We’ve talked about editing your first draft and tips and advice for those big picture items, but what about when you know your story is finished but in need of tiny tweaks and polishing? That’s what we’ll look at today, sentence level edits. Sentence level editing comes in a few forms, stylistic, copy (or grammar and spelling), and proofreading. The last one, we’ll get to at a later date but we will consider both style and grammar today.

In this installment of the CTRL+F series, we’re going to talk about confidence in your writing and how to stop hedging. Let things be, and be confident in what they are. This list might be the one with the most nuance when compared to both Show Don’t Tell and Avoiding the Vague, Weak and Simply Unnecessary; I feel like we started at the “almost always” and worked ourselves down to the voicy-est list.

“Show don’t tell,” is maybe one of the most ubiquitous writing rules. There is nuance to this, like all things, but for the purposes of this post, we’re going to look at some of the signposts that we’re not just showing things happen; we’re telling the reader they happened. With each CTRL+F suggestion, I’ve included some show don’t tell examples with a fix or two to create a more compelling statement.

Using a reverse outline can assist in the big picture editing of first drafts by giving you some space from the text itself. When we’re editing the text it’s easy to be distracted by the prose when we actually want to look at the narrative elements.

No first draft is perfect. The next step is the first of many editing rounds. With your first draft it will be important to avoid getting too into the nitty-gritty of grammar, or even style, because you should be considering big changes. There’s no point in wrangling your commas if you might not even keep that sentence, scene or chapter! So… where do you begin?