Effective Editing

How to Take Your Writing to the Next Level

By: Molly McCowan, The Great Courses

Narrated by: Professor Molly McCowan

Editing your own work is difficult, but it’s a crucial skill to master if you want to be a successful writer. After all, writing goes far beyond simply creating a rough draft - it’s how the work evolves from a rough draft to a finished piece that separates the good from the great. And as anyone who’s tried their hand at revising a novel or memoir can tell you, it’s all too easy to become mired in the details rather than see the bigger picture, merely focusing on the trees and forgetting the forest, until it grows unwieldy and overwhelming.

The tendency during the revision process to focus on the “little picture” versus the “big picture” can be overcome with the right tools and perspective. This is where Effective Editing: How to Take Your Writing to the Next Level comes in. Book coach and editor Molly McCowan takes you through the self-editing process in 13 detailed lessons, using a step-by-step method designed to reduce overwhelm and to structure the revision process in the most productive way possible. Working from the big to the little picture of your work, Molly shows you how to strengthen character development, find and fix plot holes, build stronger scenes, focus on smooth pacing and point-of-view issues, elevate your language, and much more.

The focus of this course is for you to improve your narrative writing skills, including fiction and nonfiction, such as memoir, autobiography, biography, and personal essays. Molly’s tips and tools throughout the course can help any writer edit their own work with skill and confidence.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2021 The Great Courses (P)2021 The Teaching Company, LLC

Have Something To Edit Before Listening

This course gives a very brief overview of what editing your own work entails but I would have liked it to be a bit more indepth. It's really just a quick overview of everything, instead of really getting into the nitty gritty of editing your own manuscript.

You'll get way more out of this if you have a finished manuscript to work with.

EXCELLENT

This was an incredibly useful course! I have read many many books on writing. This book helped me to understand how I can take my writing to the next level. I highly recommend it.

Short, sweet, to the point

Succinct, useful, practical info that could be beneficial to any type of writing. Definitely recognized some areas where I could improve my own. Included pdf is a great resource as well!!

Practical thought on comprehensive edit practice

Listened several times. Best to first absorb the lessons in contemplation and then return to listen while in actual practice. Effective Editing's nuanced teaching is particularly accommodating of learning in this way.

Thank you

Thanks for clear actionable items. I was putting in daily effort and could not really place how to organize all the little things I noticed. This is a huge help.

Loved it.

As a writer, I found this very helpful. I especially appreciated the tidbits on why still hiring a professional and the end is needed. This is one of those essential listens that you will go back over again to glean more.

Listen, listen and listen again

Invaluable advice, structured in a manner accessible for armatures and aspiring professionals. Fantastic course. Has gotten me to the stage of submitting a trilogy to literary agents and I’m feeling quietly confident having followed this step by step guide.
Thank you for that great piece of work.

Useful and thoughtful

It's a good, clear guide to learn how to self-edit, how to find an editor, and, most importantly, why editing matters.

If you aren't finished with your first draft, then this has advice you don’t need yet, but it's still very useful

Solid Guide on Editing and Writing

This is an excellent book on editing and writing. The lecturer starts off by explaining the four types of editing. Make sure the plot and structure make sense (developmental editing) before tweaking sentences chapter by chapter (line editing). A copyeditor would check for grammar and typos. A proofreader would look at the proof copy of the book (hence, a proofreader) and check for typos and page appearance. As the lecturer gives advice on developmental editing, it really becomes a lecture about writing (or rewriting bad prose). There are many "before" and "after" examples so you can see how bad writing can be fixed.

great big picture to details editing process

The biggest takeaway I got from the course is that there are multiple levels to editing, and it is important to start at the top first. When I edit, I usually start somewhere near the bottom, and it shows. The other interesting takeaway is that there is a known structure to what makes a story good. The book recommended is called "Save the Cat". Following this structure is a necessary, but not sufficient step to writing a good story.

I also learned the importance of hiring an outside editor to gain distance and professional quality line editing. Line editing gives it that final polish to make the manuscript publication material, but is also a step that requires a lot of expertise, and is at the very bottom of the editing hierarchy. Therefore, it is best done by a professional, while the higher levels are best done by myself.