11 EVERYBODY NEEDS AN EDITOR
Many writers like to complain about editing. It’s often tongue in cheek – for example, the novelist Ian Rankin likes to tell Twitter about the cruelty of his editors forcing him to fix things when he thought he was finished – but sometimes it’s genuine. The writer has produced a masterpiece and hates being told that it isn’t perfect.
The writer is usually wrong, because almost everybody benefits from having an editor look at their work.
No matter how much effort and expertise you’ve put into your writing, the first version can almost always be improved. There’s a reason newspapers, magazines and book publishers employ editors: they take the writers’ work and make it better.
Editing is particularly important in technical ...
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