Editing is deciding

Editing is not tidying. It is deciding, and that is why people avoid it.

I watch writers, including myself, mistake the two. Tidying is moving a comma, swapping a word, fixing the tense. It feels like editing because the document changes. Nothing about the piece has been decided. Every idea it started with is still in it, wearing better clothes.

Editing is choosing which one is the idea, and then removing the others, which were also good, and which someone worked on. That is not a language skill. It is the willingness to lose something in front of people.

The tell is the length. A piece that has been tidied is roughly the length it started at. A piece that has been edited is shorter, sometimes by half, and the missing half is the decision made visible.

This is why briefs, decks and campaign plans stay long. Nobody in the chain is empowered to decide, so everyone tidies. The junior fixes the grammar. The manager adds a slide. The director softens a claim. The document gets better and longer and less clear, and arrives at the top as a thing that has been touched by nine people and chosen by none.

The person who edits is the person who is allowed to be wrong. The cut idea might have been the right one. Editing means accepting that risk in exchange for a piece that says one thing, and a reader who knows what that thing is.

I have started to use a blunt question on anything I am asked to edit. Not "how can this be better". What is this trying to say, in one sentence, and what in it is not that?

Everything that is not that is the edit.