Editing tips for speechwriters and other writers

At Medium on September 5, 2020 there is a very useful article by Jay Krasnow titled 10 Editing Tips Writers Need to Know (one involves bean soup). They can be applied to speechwriting, PowerPoint, and blog posts. I have paraphrased them as follows:

Don’t leave out the main ingredient – be sure there are beans in the bean soup.

Look at your copy upside-down.

Check all the names (people and places).

Verify the pairs (parentheses, brackets).

Are all acronyms defined when they first are used?

Verify the phone numbers, addresses, and hyperlinks.

Do titles and section headings make sense?

Look for clusters of errors.

Make sure you read it out loud.

Check your formatting.

When you look at your printed copy upside-down, spacing errors and weird fonts will stand out. In Patrick Winston’s presentation on How to Speak (discussed in my previous post) at 31:48 he described looking at a printout of a presentation to see if the slides were too heavy – cursed with solid blocks of text.

The last thing I do with a blog post after I publish it is to go back and add all the hyperlinks. Then I view it, and click on the hyperlinks to see they all work. When reading through the post I may find errors not caught by the spell checker in Word – like accidentally leaving the h off of harm.

In Jeff Smith’s 1990 cookbook The Frugal Gourmet on Our Immigrant Ancestors the recipe for Beef Bulgogi lists ingredients for the marinade but it doesn’t say how much or what type of beef to use. The text just says to prepare the beef. A later web version at Good Food says it really is one pound of beef ribeye.

At the Gem State Patriot News there recently was a pair of articles by Dr. John Livingston with repeated misspellings. One on September 3, 2020 titled Lies and More Lies says flue instead of flu (as shown above). That’s a cluster of spelling errors. A second article on September 5, 2020 titled Do you believe in miracles? says Devine instead of Divine. (Andy Devine was a well-known character actor, but not divinely inspired). In between those two there is a third on September 4, 2020 titled What is an expert? Dr. Livingston says that:

“An expert is someone who knows a great amount about a small slice of the world, and most experts fail to see how their small sliver of the pie relates to the rest of the world.”

But we expect his small sliver to include getting all the spelling right - rather than depending on an editor to fix that detail. Another version of What is an expert? appears at the Idaho Freedom Foundation on September 8, 2020 titled Experts and the people. There the author is listed with his middle initial as Dr. John M. Livingston. That version was edited to have more paragraphs.

An article by Olivia Mitchell at Speaking About Presenting describes 9 ways to edit your presentation. Olivia says to have one focus (a core message), and no more than three main points. Cut anything that does not relate to the core message, like secondary examples or stories.

Another article by Andrew Dlugan at Six Minutes on March 4, 2008 is titled Speech Preparation #5: Six power principles for speech editing. He says to edit for focus, clarity, concision, continuity, variety, impact and beauty.

The image of beef bulgogi came from Debbie Tingzon at Wikimedia Commons.