Anyway, as a blogger and freelance writer who tends to write in a highly vernacular style and who often employs...er, eccentric uses of punctuation to assist in transmitting that conversational tone, I found this blogger's take on the editing process to be interesting:
"So I developed a hierarchy of editing that let me do the most good with the time I had. My first pass through someone’s text fixed problems of organization and structure, making the text more expository. My second pass fixed problems of logic and fact that would confuse or mislead readers. My third pass fixed errors of syntax and style. My final pass fixed grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors. I stopped editing when I ran out of time – and I seldom made it to the final pass."Editing is arcane magic from where I'm sitting.
As a writer, I tend to tear stuff off in one long sitting and send it winging off to the editor still steaming hot with only minor tweaking. They'll beat on it with hammers once it gets on their desk, so as long as I've expressed my thoughts clearly and spelled everything write... rite... correctly, I figure I'm ahead of the game.
(FWIW, his blog is so full of old cars and cameras that I've added it to the sidebar.)
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