Sometimes the days are very long

Whoosh! Such a week it has already been and more still to go. About the only upside today was that I got a little spare time to edit a friend's research paper and she had become quite a good writer. Always a pleasure to edit something into which thought and effort have been poured. I like to think I've had a role. Her writing has vastly improved over the couple of years that I have edited papers for her and I hope that my advice has helped the process.

It's always a little hard to tell. The impact of editing can be a very subtle thing, especially as it relates to the next paper (or story, or whatever) rather than the current one. I know that my writing improved any time I could get someone to do a real edit job, the more red the better, and marginal notes even more so. My old writing teachers (pre college and early college) always drove me crazy because they would just grade me with a comment. "Too many words" was a favorite of one. What, because I went over the suggested length? The story was too complex? Years, and I mean several many years before I found someone who would underline the verbose passage and offer an alternative. Maybe three examples was all he did and I bet I cut hundreds of words out of every story I revised thereafter because I could see where I was going wrong, both the specific sentence constructions that were adding verbosity, and the general concept of just using more words than necessary, especially when most of them were likely to be mushy and unconcrete.

Whenever I edit, as part of my regular work or for a friend, I always hope that I can enlighten as well as polish a particular piece. I'll ask question, underline what I'm reacting to, and always trying to comment on why I recommend a change, if I know.