EDITING AS A POWERFUL GUN IN CREATING ADS
To carry out successful activities in any type of business, you cannot do without professional advertising, information content or news materials. With the help of original text content, companies and firms develop joint business with business partners, establish public relations and convince corporate clients of the correct choice. But often third-party performers who are very far from the intricacies of copy-writing take part in writing articles for filling and promoting sites. Quite often the most ingenious ideas cannot find a worthy embodiment in the form of solid text content that is pleasant to read and understandable.
Each of us is familiar with the situation when, when reading textual content to fill the site, it becomes noticeable that certain phrases have a double meaning, and some words are completely inappropriate in this context. In such cases, you should turn to professional services for editing and proofreading text content (articles, news, press releases, etc.). Professional editing and editing of original content allows you to identify and eliminate punctuation and spelling errors, inaccuracies and shortcomings of a linguistic, syntactic, lexical, semantic and stylistic nature.
In case of editing a professionally drawn up text before you, your task as an editor is to check the facts, mistakes, correct the stylistics, that is, to clothe the content in an impeccably beautiful "wrapper" - shape. In relation to such texts, one of the basic rules of editing can be adopted: the editor should not write for the author, he should only help to improve the text. Editing boundaries are rigidly defined when it comes to professional content that has a sense of the author's style and position. The editor must correct obvious flaws (factual inaccuracies, speech, syntactic and other errors), but if it seems to him that from a content or formal point of view it would be better to redo some individual fragments, he must do this by interacting with the author, expressing the logic of his edits. The editor is obliged to correct obvious mistakes, for non-obvious ones (do you remember the aphorism with which this article begins? The editor can also make mistakes and have a bad idea of what is good, he only needs to know one thing 100% for sure - what is bad in the text) is obliged to closely interact with the author. This is the ethics of editorial work.
In case when editing raw text (material written by a person far from working with texts, for example, an article by an expert from your company, whom you asked to write about the technical side of the work of a new gadget that has replenished your line-up), you will have to completely rewrite the material. Such texts do not just need stylistics and errors correction, they need much more global redistribution of architectonics, formulations, syntax, stylistics, etc. Such texts will benefit only if very tough editorial work has been carried out with them, which is actually expressed in rewriting each paragraph and redrawing the structure. The task of the editor is to produce a ready-to-publish text that corresponds to the marketing tasks that are planned to be solved with the help of this material and the format of the platform on which it will be available to the audience - and this is also one of the main principles of the editor's work ethics.
Editing steps
a) The editor gets acquainted with the text and determines the approach by which he will be guided when working with it.
b) Editing tasks are determined (adjusting to specific goals: why do you need this text; what benefit it should bring to your brand; is it interesting to the target audience for which it is designed; for which platform it should be "sharpened", etc.) ... Editing can be justified by external circumstances: in the case, for example, if the text is not written in the format of the site where it is planned to be placed. Or it can be dictated by internal: the unsatisfactory quality of the material itself. At this stage, the editor determines whether the text corresponds to the planned volume and genre (news, guide, press release, review article, etc.), whether the author has chosen the form of contact with the audience (dry, restrained, "professorial" language or live, interspersed with colloquial vocabulary, presentation of information), whether this form corresponds to the marketing tasks that the text should solve. And finally, it is at this stage that the editor chooses how he will act when working with the material: he can give the text for revision, he can choose to fine-tune it with close cooperation with the author, or he can decide that it is more expedient to correct the text himself. In a word, the editor chooses the most rational method of work in each specific case.
c) Direct editorial work on the text is the very last stage, when an action plan has already been formed in the editor's head and an image of the text is born that ideally meets the tasks to be solved.
All the time until the editor started editing itself (that is, in stages 1 and 2), in fact, busy with serious work. At stages 1 and 2, the editor reads the text several times, the concept of the final material gradually crystallizes in his head, he plans the actions that he needs to take to achieve his task. It is at these “preliminary” stages that the most important thing happens - understanding what you need to get in the end. The editor never reads the text like a simple reader - he proofreads it, always doing internal work, evaluating and determining how to improve the material.
Reading and thinking through the editing steps are very important turning points in the work. There are several types of editorial reading.
- Introductory - when attention is focused on the content, the idea of the material, the author's style. The editor evaluates the text as a whole.
2, In-depth - attention is directed to each fragment, each semantic structure, and each word separately. The editor goes from the proposal to the whole, makes notes and comments. This is a key form of editorial reading. In the course of it, all significant corrections are made, substantive, factual, stylistic, spelling and punctuation errors are corrected.
3. Grinding - attention is directed to the final correction of the entire text as a whole. This type of reading can be called "sliding" - the glance skims through the entire material, stops selectively at some points (for example, there is a clear thought in my head: to double-check all historical dates in this text or the uniformity of writing car brands and names, etc. etc.). This is a control proofreading, after which the text can be passed to the content manager for layout.
But ideally it is always useful to postpone the text and return to it again after some time - to see how it reads. Then the picture will be clearer and clearer. Perhaps you will make a few more minor sanding or even important edits.
Editing types
Editing content that you offer to your audience is always subject to specific goals. By editing, you are solving a problem. For example: shorten the text to a certain volume (if you are dealing with a press release, where you need to clearly and concisely, without deviations, convey the current message in the language of news journalism) Or: proofread the text and literally process it, correct mistakes and shortcomings in it. Or: radically alter the material to improve its quality.
We can formally distinguish four types of editorial revisions:
1. Reduction
2. Stylistic processing
3. Proofreading
4. Alteration
Let's talk about each in more detail.
Reduction. The task of editing this type is to reduce the amount of material to the required one. This can be encountered when creating content, for example, for a corporate brochure, or when you agree to publish material on the sites of large news outlets that have clear requirements for the volume of materials. What kind of changes does the editor make in order to shorten the text? He isolates certain semantic links that can be thrown out painlessly. Having outlined the abbreviations correctly (during the exclusion of semantic fragments, the general meaning of the text should not be distorted), the editor removes the “unnecessary” and carries out work on a logical, smooth connection of the “joints” between the parts that were next to each other after the semantic links were reduced. That is, it makes the text coherent, removes any hint of "raggedness". At the same time, it is important to track that events or facts that have already been thrown out of the text are not mentioned anywhere else, even indirectly. But it is far from always possible to painlessly shorten whole semantic fragments in a text. It happens that the connection between all paragraphs of the text is so strong that the reduction in whole fragments, sentences, can weaken the semantic side of the text or even destroy it. In this case, only the following type of editing will help.
Stylistic processing. This is the most common revision, in which the editor pursues the goal of improving the text in terms of form and content, emphasizing, if required, the author's intention. Changes of a different nature are made to the text: abbreviations, replacement of individual phrases, syntactic constructions, addition or rewriting of fragments requiring revision, improvement of the compositional structure of the text. If the goal is to reduce the text to the required volume, but there is no possibility to exclude individual semantic links from it (since this will entail a distortion of the content of the text as a whole), then you can go by excluding individual words (for example, often epithets, in the role of which, as a rule, adjectives appear, you can remove them without breaking semantic connections in the text), or rewriting individual phrases (guided by the idea that you can always say more succinctly and easier).
Proofreading. The editor corrects grammatical and punctuation errors in the text, pays attention to the formal uniformity of spelling of terms, numbers, dates (for example, it cannot be called a good form if in one fragment of the text the dates are alphabetic, and in the other - numeric), checks the spelling of names, checks the dates of historical events, makes sure that the text contains subheadings (materials for the web, for ease of perception, must be divided into separate semantic blocks with subheadings) and other rules for formatting texts intended for distribution via Internet channels (clear paragraphs so that the text does not look like a sheet; the presence of captions for illustrations; interesting frames that will be specially designed when typesetting the material, etc.).
Alteration. In fact, this type of editing involves the creation of another version of the material based on the text that the author created. The editor takes facts, information gathered in the text, and arranges it competently, clothe thoughts in a stylistically impeccable form.
Naturally, these types of edits can be singled out only formally, at the level of theory, approaching the issue of editing, because when working on the material, you cannot only shorten and not correct grammatical errors, or only correct speech errors and not pay attention to the fact that in one case in the text the word "Mercedes" is written with a lowercase letter without quotation marks, and in another - with an uppercase letter and in quotation marks. Such "reduction" does not fit into the concept of "editorial work on the text".
The editor rules both the whole and every single phrase; every little thing should not go unnoticed. Thus, the division into revision types is very arbitrary; you cannot limit the work on the text to any one type of revision. The editing process is the same, and the professionalism of the editor is manifested in the combination and application of all editing techniques.