There are commonalities between content editors and organizers.
I interviewed a professional organizer recently for a business journal looking for a brief profile piece. I decided that with the New Year approaching, discussing how to clean up the messes on our desks would be timely and relevant. (I may or may not have been inspired by my own workspace.)
Organizer Janine Cavanaugh of North Attleboro, Mass., graciously walked me through the main methods and mindsets of decluttering, re-evaluating and restoring order.
Decluttering. Re-evaluating. Restoring order. Organizing is like editing. There are definite parallels between organizers going through your closet with a “donate” box and editors going through a blog post with a red pen.
Editors take care of sentence decluttering. I am constantly deleting words like “currently” or “existing” — words that aren’t needed 99% of the time — from text. Re-evaluating is what an editor does, as well. The writer has already gotten the assignment, written it, evaluated it, and pressed “send”; the editor re-evaluates the piece in terms of content, evidence, structure, style and readability.
Just as organizing is much more than labeling bins and creating piles, editing is much more than fixing spelling and righting punctuation. Those things are a smaller task in reaching the bigger goal: restoring order to text. Editors morph written material into something that better resonates with the reader. We tag areas for clarification, make wobbly sentences parallel; and get rid of unnecessary distractions. Just as each item on our desk should earn its place and be highly functional, so should words in sentences.
You may want to consider having an editor get you out from all that clutter. And I may want to have an organizer help me with my desk.