All About Copyediting: 55 Easy Edits to Improve Your Writing Skills Forever

Before we start

Let’s get this straight from the outset. This guide is not telling you how to write. It will not try to impose any kind of style to your work. It does not in any way set out to constrain you as a writer.

This guide will refer to flow, lazy and bad writing, show not tell, etc. So, before we start copyediting, let’s take a look at what is meant by some of these terms.

In this section:

i. Show, not tell

Lights! Camera! Action!

ii. ‘Bad writing’

Just what is it?

iii. Lazy writing

You can do better.

iv. Narration vs. dialogue & informality

Saying it how it is.

v. Flow

Following your instincts.

vi. In summary

Let the copyediting commence!

i. Show, Not Tell

As a writer, you should be aiming to enhance your readership’s connection to your fictional world with every piece of descriptive prose, every sentence of dialogue and every paragraph. You must take every opportunity to help them visualise your story.

One of the best ways of accomplishing this is to show, not tell. You have the opportunity to tell the reader, second-hand, what is happening or to show it them directly.

For the purposes of this guide, we have a love triangle between Bill, his wife Margery and interloper, John.

Telling the reader:

Bill looked at John, who had one of those roguishly attractive faces that got better with age, at his glinting eyes with secrets hidden behind them, at the rough flock of Irish red hair lying across his forehead.

Bill is telling us about John, the grammar is passable and all appears good… but can we do better?

Showing the reader:

John burst into the room, an eternal rogue in his fifties. All red hair and flashing Irish eyes but furtive, with a rake for a smile, and an air of ‘I don’t give a damn’. He piled into Bill, offering a short stubby hand.

In the above example we can see and almost feel John.

In modern fiction, showing is always better than telling. You do not always have to show, but it is important to know the distinction.

ii. ‘Bad Writing’

There are grammar experts out there who can pull apart any great piece of literary work and expose its grammatical flaws. Your work will not be any different - it will contain many flaws.

The trick?

Don’t let it bother you too much.

Writing that does not follow the rules or conventions is not, per se, ‘bad writing.’ Far from it.

Writing should always come from informed choice. Often stylistic concerns and sentence flow will dictate the words you use rather than grammatical rules and convention. But this does not mean that you can abandon grammar altogether. Instead, as a writer, you need to understand these rules and conventions and make informed decisions about when to ignore them.

Once you have familiarised yourself with the fifty-five steps of this guide, you will notice how some of your favourite authors do not always follow these rules and conventions. Their work is still readable and engaging, they are possibly very successful authors…

And so we get to the nitty gritty… Just what is ‘bad writing?’

When I refer to ‘bad writing’ in this guide, I mean: writing that contains unacceptable or poor grammar (grammar that does not work in any context); writing that uses extra and unnecessary words and repeats the same phrases; writing that unintentionally puts the author in a bad