Editing Efficiently

Editing is all about accuracy, but efficiency is nice, too. Here are some tricks and tips that can make your working hours a bit more productive and efficient.

Keep Author Requests Top of Mind

Barring cases when customers send in docs without any special requests, user comments should be your first line of advice when figuring out your editing priorities. 

Ctrl + F and Replace

Often, when a user spells a word incorrectly, there's a good chance it's spelled incorrectly elsewhere in the document. The "Find and Replace" feature in Word can help alleviate the headache of seeing the same word misspelled. Every. Single. Time. This feature is particularly helpful when a user requests American English but writes about how "grey is their favourite colour" or if they request British English and use -ize endings exclusively. Find and replace is also helpful for removing any issues with spacing between words and/or double spaces after periods right off the bat. 

Don't Go Overboard with Reference Lists/Citations

While you are certainly encouraged to point out inconsistencies and missing information in a reference or works cited list, you are under no obligation to seek out the sources that were used or create references from scratch. A short comment explaining the issue and offering tips on how to resolve it is enough.

Serial Commas

Regardless of how you feel about Oxford/serial commas, they can become tedious to constantly include/delete. Depending on which version of Word you have, you can adjust your Spelling and Grammar Check to require serial commas, forbid serial commas, or not check them at all. This is not a foolproof method, but it can help point out any instances that might require a second look.

Comment, Comment, Comment

Our customers love comments. It's often faster to comment on organizational issues or rephrasing rather than spending hours and hours reworking someone's paper until it's perfect. We definitely want to hand back polished work, but it's okay to also make suggestions about how the work can be even better so that the author can try their hand at it. 

You can also use comments when you genuinely don't understand what you're reading. It's fine to hit up the Water Cooler and see if any of your fellow editors can make sense of something, but it's also fine to politely tell the customer, "I had trouble understanding what you were trying to say here, so I could not edit it," or "I'm not sure whether you meant x or y here. If you meant x, it should read, '......' and if you meant y, '.......' would be better." This saves you time, and it can prevent you from rewriting papers, which is outside of the scope of what we provide. 

Consider the Author and the Subject

Here at Kibin we help a range of customers on topics that cover everything under the sun, which means we have to be very careful about voice. It also means that you might provide a different kind of edit every document. A freshman ESL student who is submitting a reflection paper on their progress over the semester, for example, is not going to need the same kind of edit as a PhD candidate submitting their dissertation on particle physics for final review. More technical and advanced documents are going to require more precision with language and very close attention to detail; in documents like student papers, you'll want to make sure that the writer's own voice shines through. Both can be tough in their own way, but knowing who you're dealing with and adjusting your focus accordingly can save you a lot of time and energy.

Link to Sources in Your Comments

When you're editing a paper, it's easy to get wrapped up in long explanations of the rules of grammar or the function of topic sentences -- I know we just want to be as helpful as we can! -- but that can also be super time consuming. To save you a lot of time and typing, you can copy and paste a link in your comments to a source that explains the issue you're addressing in greater detail. A small explanation in the comment plus a link to an outside source with more information gives the writer a focused critique and a way to learn more on their own. That way, you don't have to explain every single way to fix a comma splice in one comment. 

Start a bookmarks folder in your browser for sources you use often. If it's already bookmarked, you won't have to spend time googling "essay organization tips" or "capitalization rules for academic degrees" a million times over. The Kibin Blog has TONS of great posts on writing good topic sentences, the anatomy of a paragraph, how to write a thesis statement, what makes a good essay conclusion, and more. The blog even has a search function that makes it easy to find what you're looking for. The articles are fun to read AND super helpful in guiding writers in the right direction -- plus, it keeps users on our site! Check it out and bookmark your favorites, but you can definitely use any source you find or like as long as it helps the writer. 

Buy a Coffeemaker/Tea Kettle

It's no secret that editing and caffeine go together like peas and carrots. Whether its coffee, tea, an energy drink, or matcha leaves, a little pick-me-up can do wonders for focus and editing efficiency.