One of my absolute favorite editorial tasks is to do content editing. For those of you not familiar with the term, content editing is, in essence, editing a composition to see what is missing, what needs to be rearranged, and what needs to be deleted or changed so the “content” of the composition meets its intended goal. This is certainly not a dictionary definition of content editing, but it’s mine.
In my opinion, content editing is the most important component of the whole editing process. If you don’t have the content nailed down, all the proofreading in the world won’t help. If you do your own writing and editing, before you even try to fix grammatical, spelling, or tense errors, do a content edit. Read through your own writing and make everything in there should stay or what gaps you have in your information or argument. You should never leave your readers wondering “what?” or “why?”.
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