How is this going to work?

- Okay, so this course is gonna be really interactive. We're basically gonna edit a piece together. The piece in question is an article about a government plan to introduce color coding on sugary drinks, like red, amber, green, to show people how potentially dangerous the sugar content is in a bottle of drink. Now, it's a simple idea, I chose it because it's something that almost anyone can relate to because it's about health. But the thing is, I deliberately made this article as messy and as unwieldy as I possibly could based on a variety of sources that I gathered from the Internet about this subject. Now, I've shuffled things around, made it really unwieldily. Hopefully, you'll never have to edit anything quite as messy as this, but it's great for practicing with because it will force to deal with every single layer of the editing process that I'm talking about. But it means it's gonna be hard to edit, and I mean really hard. But it'll be worth the effort because afterwards, your skill level with editing is gonna skyrocket. So I want you to honor the effort that I've put into creating this paradigm by committing to doing this really properly. And by that, I mean methodologically. One lecture at a time and follow it through like that. Trust me, it'll be worth it, and this knowledge that's gonna really set you apart from other writers and editors for a lifetime so it's worth putting in that effort. Even if you just write at work, your work will stand out like never before. So I promise you, time and attention will be well rewarded if you follow this. So don't worry that you might be editing something different than an article because what's important here are the principles. If you can edit this, you will be able to edit almost anything else just as easily because you'll get to understand the process of deep editing, and I'm gonna be telling you what needs to be done in each stage of that process. You'll apply the concepts one by one to the article as we go, and then I'll show you how I would apply each principle myself so that you can compare the results, yours and mine. The reason for doing it this way is that I want you to really absorb each stage properly. I want you to be thinking carefully about each editing concept as you go and trying to apply it before I give you my own solution. Now, I figured that's the best way to come out of this with an actual strong skill set, and that's, of course, exactly what I want for you. The good news is that the results of deep editing are gonna be plain for anybody to see in the writing that you go on to produce. Your work will definitely stand out, I'm sure of that. But even better, you're gonna love having this power. This seemingly mystical power to turn chaotic and rambling prose into writing that has remarkable poise, style, and impact. If you're a copy editor, your clients are gonna be thrilled, just like my clients usually are with the work that I produce for them. If you're an author, a blogger, a copywriter, or someone else who writes for a living yourself, your readers are gonna love your content even more than before. So if you're ready, let's begin learning how to become a masterful editor. Now, a few very important things to note before I begin, guys. I want you to remember throughout this course that editing is really an art, not a science. And what that means is that you may or may not agree with every change I make to the piece of writing that we're editing throughout this course and that's fine. The fact is it can be quite subjective at times, so I really don't want you to get too distracted by disagreements and opinions about what changes I'm making to the content. Feel free to disagree or even come up with better solutions yourself. However, editors often disagree with each other so please don't get hung up on that. Even I'll disagree with myself on different days, depending on how I feel about a particular sentence or an expression of an idea. The important thing isn't that you agree with my changes along the way. As I said, editing is not a science, but an art, and that means what I'm giving you here are not so much rules as guidelines. The sooner you understand that, the more quickly you'll become a good editor. The important thing, and I really want you to get this, is that you grasp the process of deep editing. And that's what I want you to do throughout, focus on the process above all else. Not on whether I've made the right choices myself with the content. If you're smart, you'll put aside any disagreements you may have with my editing choices, such as my language, my use of grammar, et cetera, and instead, you'll focus on understanding each stage of the process that I'm showing you. And that should be where all of your attention goes. Then, you go and implement each technique as you think best, even if I may not necessarily agree about your choices. Now, the second important thing to keep in mind is that throughout this course, there are going to be problems with punctuation, spelling, grammar, typos popping up all the time. I may also make interpretations of the material that you might disagree with. I'm very aware of that, and so there's really no point calling me out on those. In other words, you don't need to point out a spelling mistake here and there for instance, or some phrasing that isn't perfectly grammatical or some interpretation of the material that you wouldn't have made. You don't need to say, "Hey, you just mistyped a word "and left it like that," or, "Hey, the grammar "in that sentence you just wrote is completely wrong." In fact, sometimes I'm leaving those mistakes in deliberately so that I can come to them at a later stage of the edit. So you'll just have to get used to ignoring them and focusing on what's important in that particular lecture. You'll have to be patient because the piece we're editing will become better and better but in stages. And it's only at the later stages, that it starts to look really polished, and even then, there may be a few howling mistakes that won't be tackled until the very end. Sometimes, in fact, I may even introduce mistakes as I type, just so that I can come back to them to illustrate something else that's important at a later point. If I were to fix everything up straight away, you wouldn't get to see all of the stages of the deep edit clearly enough. So remember, I'm gonna go through one stage of deep editing at a time, and all I want you to do is really focus on that particular stage tightly while I'm discussing it. In other words, just overlook any errors that occur along the way and place your attention instead on understanding that particular stage of the process. By the very end, hopefully everything, or at least almost everything, has been fixed, even though we may still disagree over the wording or some interpretations. In fact, I'd be happy if you learned these techniques and went on to use them to edit stuff better than me. I'm simply giving you the techniques so that you know how deep you can go with the editing process. How many different angles you can consider when working with a document. There's also the time factor. Most edits improve according to how much time you have to spend on them. You can often find typos and so on, on daily newspapers for instance because there simply isn't the time to get things perfect. The aim with all edits is to get things as good as you can in the time available. Now, this being partly a live edit, I can't promise perfection, but certainly a high enough standard for most purposes, okay? And the final thing I wanna say is that this deep editing technique will give you so many different tools as I mentioned. That doesn't mean you will use every one of these deep editing techniques in everything that you edit. I'm gonna be working with a newspaper article here because I think that gives the best opportunity for teaching the largest number of deep editing techniques that I know. Most of the techniques will be great for writing or editing blog posts, for example, or other similar types of writing. But when it comes to different types of business writing, especially the more official types, a few of the techniques may not be necessary or even appropriate. But they are still all worth knowing so that you can choose which ones are suitable for whatever it is that you're writing. That's a choice I'll leave up to you because you'll obviously know better than me the type of thing that you're editing. I talk in the course, for instance, about creating dramatic introductions. That's in the style edit section. Now, obviously, you'll have to weigh up how useful such a technique is for what you're editing. It may not be, say if you're writing a really sober business analysis of an industry. So don't think that you must use every technique simply because I'm showing it to you. What I'm basically trying to say here is to use these techniques intelligently by weighing carefully which particular deep editing tactics are useful for your purpose. I'm really giving you a framework here, not a set of rules that you must follow. It's not like you have to use this technique every time in a piece of writing. I'm just giving you the entire tool box of tricks and tactics that I know for editing well. It's up to you to use those tools appropriately and to decide carefully which ones apply to whatever you're working with, okay? With all that understood, let's begin learning how to deep edit a piece of writing.