How to Perform a Soft Edit
- By Jane Sumerset
- Published 03/16/2010
- Writing
- Unrated
Jane Sumerset
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Have you ever heard the term soft edit? What’s the difference between a soft edit and editing we commonly heard? You might have wondered but soft edit is also a part in the writing process. It plays a very important role where every writer’s must have to deal with it.
For longer pieces, such as booklets and multi-page reports, light editing might be necessary throughout various phases in the writing composition. Sure, you can perform a full edit once you’ve completed the entirety of the piece, but a soft edit should let you clean up what you have in the meantime.
Why would you even want to edit before a complete draft? It depends upon you. Some people find it easier to proceed to the next phase of the content (e.g. the next chapter of a novel) when everything before it is sufficiently cleaned up. Others like having the basic facets of the text (e.g. grammar, spelling and readability) corrected early on, so they can focus on more complex portions of the piece during the latter parts of the writing process.
Besides, there are writer who prefer to edit their piece lightly so that they will never forget that there are things that needs to be polish. Editing these kinds of a writing material is really risky as it consumes most of your time scanning every pages of your write-ups. Then, you’ve got to read the whole piece in order to spot grammatical and other writing errors. Soft editing
will only help you to ease your work when you’ll do the editing process later on.
Running the text through a software-based writing tool, doing some basic proofreading and reading the copy for clarity are some of the quick steps you can employ during this activity. It won’t take plenty of time, but it should save you from a lot of corrections and adjustments that you may need to do to the text anyway if you perform a full edit later. Since it’s a light edit, rather than a full on rewriting, try to avoid doing too much changes to the piece. Save the big work for later.
You can just clean up some mess like technical writing errors. You don’t need to revise the whole piece while doing a soft edit since it will only create a bigger mess within your unfinished passage. The revision process can be done after you had written the whole piece completely.
Let’s say a light edit of one chapter shows you an average of ten things you could fix up. If you’re writing a book that features ten chapters, those are 100 things that will pile up with many others during a full edit. Getting rid of them early on with a light edit should make your later work just a tad less imposing.
That’s how soft edit works. Usually, you can take charge of the spellings, punctuations, capitalizations and other simple error solving activities within a soft edit. Do always note that changing the whole concept or any ideas in your content must be done during the full edit process where revision took place.
For longer pieces, such as booklets and multi-page reports, light editing might be necessary throughout various phases in the writing composition. Sure, you can perform a full edit once you’ve completed the entirety of the piece, but a soft edit should let you clean up what you have in the meantime.
Why would you even want to edit before a complete draft? It depends upon you. Some people find it easier to proceed to the next phase of the content (e.g. the next chapter of a novel) when everything before it is sufficiently cleaned up. Others like having the basic facets of the text (e.g. grammar, spelling and readability) corrected early on, so they can focus on more complex portions of the piece during the latter parts of the writing process.
Besides, there are writer who prefer to edit their piece lightly so that they will never forget that there are things that needs to be polish. Editing these kinds of a writing material is really risky as it consumes most of your time scanning every pages of your write-ups. Then, you’ve got to read the whole piece in order to spot grammatical and other writing errors. Soft editing
Running the text through a software-based writing tool, doing some basic proofreading and reading the copy for clarity are some of the quick steps you can employ during this activity. It won’t take plenty of time, but it should save you from a lot of corrections and adjustments that you may need to do to the text anyway if you perform a full edit later. Since it’s a light edit, rather than a full on rewriting, try to avoid doing too much changes to the piece. Save the big work for later.
You can just clean up some mess like technical writing errors. You don’t need to revise the whole piece while doing a soft edit since it will only create a bigger mess within your unfinished passage. The revision process can be done after you had written the whole piece completely.
Let’s say a light edit of one chapter shows you an average of ten things you could fix up. If you’re writing a book that features ten chapters, those are 100 things that will pile up with many others during a full edit. Getting rid of them early on with a light edit should make your later work just a tad less imposing.
That’s how soft edit works. Usually, you can take charge of the spellings, punctuations, capitalizations and other simple error solving activities within a soft edit. Do always note that changing the whole concept or any ideas in your content must be done during the full edit process where revision took place.