Editing the Report

This is the third part in the $7 Secrets case study.

Prepare yourself for torture. Well, not really, unless you’ve married yourself to your first draft while writing it.

Carrying on, I’m going to stress the importance of editing your report for quality because I’ve come across far too many of these cheap reports that look like they were thrown together by a third grader and in every case, I felt jilted. And you know what else? I will never purchase anything else put out or recommended by those authors.

You don’t want your customers to feel that way, you want them to feel as though they received real value from you because it helps to build trust.

Before you begin the process of editing your report, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with some basic copy editing symbols. (This should bring back some memories from grade school English class.)

Prepare your document for editing

As with making edits to a web page, make sure you always have a good working copy safely backed up somewhere. In case something happens or you accidentally wipe out a chunk of text, you’ll have a copy to revert to. And make sure that you don’t overwrite this copy.

Since it’s much easier (in my opinion) to edit a hard copy of a document instead of doing it on screen, it’s a good idea to prepare the document for printing. This will not be the standard format for the document when it’s ready for release, however, it will be optimized for offline editing.

Increase the right margin by .25 of an inch (left margin if you’re left handed). This extra space in the margin will allow you to take notes and document any necessary edits. Turn on page and line numbering. The numbers will help you transfer the edits from the hard document to your digital version without too much searching through the text. Double space the document. The additional space between lines will allow you to make editing marks and take quick notes.

When you have your document prepared and printed, grab yourself a red pen and step away from the computer; the computer may distract you from your editing duties.

Begin the editing process

In my experience, I’ve found it best to edit a document in waves, otherwise it’s incredibly easy to overlook something.

The first wave is all about catching the spelling and grammatical errors. Don’t allow your mind to think about anything else except catching the egregious errors.

On your second wave, tighten up the language and flow of the report; remove unnecessary words or passages. Read it out loud as you go along and see if you hiccup on any lines, chances are, if you do, you need to revise it.

The third wave is for good measure. Read your report with a fine-toothed comb to spot any errors in spelling, grammar, tone, and flow that you may have missed previously.

Some Lessons Learned (in bullet point format)

Write about 35 pages (double-spaced) for the first draft because you will edit down.
Make sure you have a back up copy safely stashed somewhere.
Set an extra bit of margin, turn on page and line numbering, and print a hard copy for editing.
Use a red pen or pencil for marking edits (or use a pen with a different color from your font color).
Edit the document in waves (first wave: spelling and grammar; second wave: flow and pace; third wave: polish).
Get a second pair of eyes to catch anything that you’ve missed in the waves of editing.
Keep the end reader in mind when preparing the document for conversion to PDF format (i.e. hyperlinked ToC, large legible font, black text on white background)