u/BWFoster78

Right now, my writing goals are split between finishing my story and taking care of many, many Amazon pre-launch activities, one of which is editing. I'm spending a lot of time on that task at the moment, and I was just thinking, "Is it worth it? Will this have an impact for readers?"

For me, certain parts of the process absolutely add value:

• Turning a jumbled mess of a sentence into something more readable.
• Improving flow (ex: smoothing an awkward transition or fixing a piece of dialogue that sounds stilted.)
• Getting rid of typos, mistakes, continuity errors, etc.
• Etc.

There's one thing that I do, though, because it's "good practice" but I was just wondering what everyone else thought about its value:

Line editing to tighten prose

One of the first "writing rules" that I learned was that tight prose was good prose. If you could say something in two words instead of three, that was a good thing. Get rid of adverbs. All that stuff.

Obviously, as one grows as a writer, one comes to understand that overediting can lead to loss of Voice, which is a far greater sin than using too many words.

Still, there are certain things that I do that aren't Voice but are just pure, in my opinion, extraneous words. Examples:

• able to instead of could
• people managing to or tending to do stuff instead of just doing stuff (sometimes needed, of course, but not nearly as often as I use them)
• was writing instead of wrote. (Substitute verb of choice for writing; also, again sometimes correct and useful, but I'm self diagnosing myself as using it way too much)
• going to instead of would
• one of the instead of a

Anyway, you should get the point of what I'm talking about... uh, what I talked about... uh... Anyway, hopefully you got the point from that.

So the question: do those kind of tightening edits really impact the reader? And if so, how much?

It's something I've always done for my final draft, and I doubt I'll ever change it. I am quite curious, though, what other people, both readers and writers, thought about the subject.

TIA.

Brian

Channeling my inner Jeff Foxworthy here:

If you read more than 300 chapters of a story, more than 600,000 words, and leave a .5 star rating, you might be an a-hole.

On a huge milestone note, my story now has 25 .5 star ratings. I see a lot of posts celebrating just one, so I think this is a pretty big accomplishment!