Editing: On Screen or Paper?

Like many of you, I work a great deal at my computer and I edit my work on screen all the time. But, often enough, if I neglect reading carefully over my work on paper, I miss essential edits.

Recently, children's author Sheryl McFarlane came to visit my Writing 12 class. In her presentation, she emphasized the importance of the paper edit to the process of writing.

A side benefit of the "paper" method is that it is easy to save all your drafts for future use. In fact, Sheryl made a strong case for saving all your drafts since, often, the first draft of all contains strong "emotional content" that is often the purest form of your ideas.

Remember to use both sides of the paper to save our trees! Edit away . . .

 

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