Nobody Ever Taught You to Cut
Something they neglect to teach you in school is the value of editing. In an academic context, we’re trained to meet word-count and page-length requirements. This creates a structure that disincentivizes editing. There were so many times when it would be 10 PM the night before a paper was due, and I would spend hours just unloading every last word humanly possible to describe a simple concept. You see this with many Substack writers (who transparently are never gonna make it out of the trenches). They tend to write in a way that is extremely verbose and comes off as pseudo-intellectual to anyone who isn’t impressed by the mere presence of big words.
Here’s an excerpt from a paper titled Design Process by Renzo Zorzi, that my friend sent me the other day: “Some, more than others — or more strictly and explicitly - have believed that the ensemble of images through which a reality is perceived and grasped is not dredged up from time to time from the infinite congeries of possible signs and of achievable hypotheses.”
Congrats bro, I’m sure you’re fun at parties. Clearly, he is saying quite literally nothing, but the jargon does its job on anyone reading fast enough to mistake his use of dense vocabulary for depth. They see sentences like this and think “Wow, this guy must know what he’s talking about!” A decent editor would’ve taken one look and cut the whole sentence to seven words.
Editing and Curation are the Same Muscle
Over the past few months, I’ve been attempting to improve both my writing and editing skills so that the communication of my ideas can be more efficient. The last thing I want is to waste the reader’s time by showing off vocabulary like the teacher’s pet at a Socratic seminar.
If you go back to my earlier articles, you can even see why I began trying to hone this skill. I had a tendency to overwrite everything, burying the point under too many words. I had a friend of mine point this out, so I contracted out my writer friend to tutor my writing and edit my essays. Over the duration of us working together, the importance of editing has become abundantly clear.
Editing an article is just curating the words already on the page to communicate an idea. Curating and selecting a photo series is the same. Removing the least compelling images to leave a cohesive body of work. It’s the same reflex, but different material. Keep what’s working, cut what isn’t.
Behind the paywall: how to strip the emotional attachment out of your own work, why an outside eye cuts faster and deeper than you can, and the exact system I use to turn my bloated archive into a daily content strategy.
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