Does all writing need editing?

Yes. Oui. Sí. Da. כן. Etc. you get the idea. I hope.

So, Why is Editing So Important?

Here’s the God’s honest truth from me. I have been writing for the better part of five decades. Yet I still miss little, nagging words. All. The. Time. And I will also, at times, type the wrong word.

So, typos are one thing. But to try to find all the times you’ve typed the when you really meant to type that? Ai yi yi that is not an easy thing to do.

So, one reason is almost for the sake of vanity, I would say. You do not want your writing to look terrible now, do you?

And, at the same time, it’s all about sense.  You want the reader to understand exactly what it is that you are driving at.

And heaven help you if the word that you miss is a negative!

There’s a world of difference between –

He was married. Versus – he was never married (or not married).

Spelling, Grammar, and Colonialism

So, are our spelling rules vestiges of conquest and colonialism? You betcha. Are they perhaps unfair to people who haven’t had the advantages of an education? My God, yes. And are they maybe a disservice for people who are disabled? Why, yes. Yes, they are.

Yet (unless we are writing a dialect) we should follow the conventions anyway.

But why?

Because even though the spelling for a word like queue is kind of silly when you really think about it, it’s the spelling that most people agree upon.

Phonetics can only take you so far. And this is not the word cue.

She waited in a queue, holding a cue, and took a cue from the director.

Here, spelling matters. And it matters elsewhere, too.

So as I said above, one of the biggest points of writing is for your readers to understand you.

Fix your mistakes. But better yet, bring in someone else to do it.