The Best Way To Edit: Screen or Paper?

Yee haw! It's time to start the editing process for your first draft. So the question is, do you tap on your keys or reach for a pen?

I've found in my freelance work that I need to look at my copy in a different light in order to edit it. That means I need to move it over to a different format, whether it's a PDF version or a printout, or in the case of a blog post I put it in preview mode.

So as I sat here staring at this massive thing called a book manuscript, my first inclination was to print it out. Which I did. But then I started wondering if this is really the way I want to attack it.

Because although I've written millions of words (literally) in my career, I've never been in the position of editing a book. A user manual? Sure. But that type of document is so very different from what I have in front of me.

And I guess it comes down to what you are editing for. Maybe if you're editing for overall structure and to fill in large gaps, printing it out and taking pen to paper is probably worthwhile.

But then maybe once you get into the nitty gritty of copy editing you'll want to edit in the soft copy, because let's be honest...who wants to mark up typos and grammar issues and then go through and fix them on the screen? It's like repeating the process, and who has time for that? But then the question becomes whether or not you can really catch everything while looking at a screen (this is the point of printing it out).

As I think through it further, perhaps the best way to go about editing is to do some sort of hybrid of the two. Maybe you read the printed out version and make notes, while simultaneously typing up major rewrites or fixing typos in the live document. And then maybe when you're done, you can go back and compare and see what you've got.

So maybe that's where I'll start for now, and see where it takes me.

Do you have a method for editing your work? Please share it in the comments!