Editing

Hello, coffee lovers and avid readers! Welcome to Olive’s Corner at Olive’s Café, where you get insight on thoughts of life.

Here’s my opinion on editing: although it’s tedious work, it’s important for the quality of the content being created.

For all the years that I have been in school, I never thought how important editing was, especially when I didn’t know about editing until my junior year in high school. I turned in a submission for a short story as I was inspired by Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot murder mystery. When I received it back, I cried because of the number of markings made on the paper and the feedback I got from the teacher, and I thought that they just hated my work. However, once I got into college, I understood that editing was important when presenting any written work and I realized that all I’ve been doing was turning in drafts and not quality work. Even though I understood that editing was important, I still didn’t take it seriously until creative writing class, when I worked on my poem and prose for my final. It was such tedious work, but once I got it done, it turned out better than when I turned them in the first time. It even got to the point where I edited all of my old blog posts for my internship, and then later when I started to take blogging seriously and worked on bringing quality into all of my posts. When it comes to editing, we bring out the quality of our work for the best content for our audience.

Editing may not directly be related to life, but it does apply to any field that involves documentations. We edit everything we create because we want to make sure that the creations are cohesive for the audience to understand what they’re receiving and let them enjoy our projects. We also want to fix any errors that we make from our drafts because when we draft our work, we dump all of our ideas and thoughts on paper without being aware of the errors we make. When we edit, we’re putting together the puzzle pieces by filling up the spaces and filling in the cracks and reveal the final picture. While we fix the errors and cohesively put together our thoughts, we bring out the magic from our creations and produce quality work, even revealing our style to make a name for ourselves. We can always tell the difference of style and quality of the creator just by how we edit our work.

Editing can be applied to anything from legal documents to instructions on how to operate machinery or building furniture, but the tedious work of editing is found more in the art field. When artists, like me, edit our creations, we edit with artistic vision and a mission to bring the best quality of our work. My discipline is in manuscripts and journaling, for instance, where I have to constantly edit my articles and project before posting them online for the audience to read. It takes a lot of time because I have to fix the errors, remove excessive information, and add new ideas when they surface, meanwhile making changes while arranging the ideas to tell the story. Editing is applied to not only manuscripts, but also in film, photography, paintings and drawings, songs, journals, and even podcasts, so all of our work is not finalized until the editing has been done. That’s why it takes months or even years for anything to be released: there’s the brainstorming and outlining, then there’s the drafting, next is the editing, and finalizing is the last step.

Editing may be such a tedious job because it takes a lot of time to look through a project to fix and make any changes, but I find editing to be so important and it’s a task that I enjoy. I like making marks so I can make those changes later and engineer my work for any errors. Ever since I edited my old blog articles, I always edit my work before I post them because I want my audience to enjoy the work that I put out and understand my stories. My novel project is what forces me to take time editing so I can find those errors and make the necessary changes before I publish my work. I’m even currently editing my novel and going back to the drafts I’m finding a lot of errors and missing information to avoid plot holes and putting the puzzle pieces together to paint the picture of my story. I know that once I’m done, my work will turn out great.

Remember, if you’re an artist or even want to become one, know that editing is necessary to perform so we can bring out great quality work that will amaze the audience, even though it’s tedious and it’s a lot of work. Let no one tell you otherwise.

Thank you for tuning in on Olive’s Corner at Olive’s Café!