It’s never perfect the first time

Posted on 27 February 2014 by roseenmj under Editing

As an editor, I would love to think that any text I have scoured will be perfect when I give it back to the author. Yet we all know that nothing is ever quite as perfect as we want it to be. No matter how many times I review a text, I will always find something to fix.

How did I miss “Spend some time everyday reading this chapter”? Clearly, it should read, “Spend some time every day . . .”

I know that choose and chose are not the same, but I can so easily skip the missing “o.”

I wonder if our ability to miss the same thing twelve times has anything to do with this theory: raeding bteewen the lteters.

Sometimes, I even re-edit my own edits, deciding that they really did sound better before I got to them.

How many times do you review a work before you finally let it go? Do you ever have editor’s remorse (the feeling that you just set a work free that still had too many errors)?

It’s hard to start at the beginning

Posted on 22 February 2014 by roseenmj under Me

I have been a professional editor for over two years, and I have been editing my life since I started living it. Yet for some reason, establishing an identity online has been harder than I imagined it would be. When you sit down to create a webpage, the rest of the internet is only a click away. If you avoid distraction, how do you begin to write?

When you write your first post, you are unsure. Can you just jump in and start writing about one of your soapbox convictions? Do you need to introduce yourself first?

This is my first post as MJRLawrence, editor. Words, languages, Jesus, friends, family, and teaching children big ideas using little words are a few things that excite me. I have passionately held beliefs, but I am not afraid to be proven wrong. Of the five states I have lived in, North Carolina is the coldest, but I married a man from New Jersey. We named our dog after a hockey player.

I am currently reading On Writing Well by William Zinsser.