One of the user education team’s responsibilities is to double as a department communications review committee. We don’t all get together to hash out an announcement or to rip apart someone’s status report. One of us will do an initial edit, and our manager does the second edit before approving it (or not—but we very rarely scrap anything).

We used to take turns meeting with the manager to go over the latest communications together. However, since another role or two was added to the manager’s responsibilities, it’s turned into a more electronic thing. Even back when we were meeting in person, one of my colleagues asked if he could get his assignments ahead of time so he could edit them electronically. At this point, this is mostly how it’s happening.

I’ve fallen out of the habit of printing out help topics or other documents (two pages to a sheet to save paper, right?), though I’ve historically done my editing that way. I printed some help pages out for editing in the same day I edited some department communications electronically, which led me to think about the strengths of each.

So the title of this post is kind of a trick question. I don’t think one method is more effective than the other; I think each has its positive effect in the editing process.

Strengths of On-Screen Editing

One of the best things about editing on the screen is the ability to move sentences or even larger chunks of text around. It’s difficult to do that on a sheet of paper without a bunch of brackets and arrows, and that can get messy and confusing.

Another great part is the ability to phrase your edits the way you want. More than once it’s happened where I’ve been trying to reword something on a hard copy, and I start to write one thing. Then a better way to word it comes to mind, so I have to start over. I may think of something else after that. Soon, all I have is a margin full of scribbled-out writing. And I still don’t have the new wording on there. So I have to put a star, turn the page over, put another star, and write out my brilliantly reworded text. You don’t end up with the scribble problem on the screen.

Further, those edits are easier to read on the screen. When you cross something out on the page, it affects the readability of what was crossed out, and writing in between lines and in margins makes the edits hard to decipher sometimes. Using something like Word’s Track Changes, if used well, leaves things readable.

And with something like Track Changes (or with X-Edit, I think), you can just accept changes. You don’t have to go back and type in all the edits.

Strengths of Hard-Copy Editing

I can’t explain this one, but for some reason, when I edit on a page, I catch wording problems more often. I catch places where information is missing. It’s like I think more critically when I’m reading on a page, and I’m not sure if that’s really the case or, if it is, why it’s the case. It just is. Other writers have told me it works similarly for them. My documents almost always have more edits when I print them out, and I take that as a good sign. It makes me worry a little about the quality of the stuff that I never review in print.

In a hard copy, if I need to go back and forth to check consistency of facts, it’s easier to get around because I have that sense of how far back and where I saw something. It’s harder to do that electronically because the document is one vertical flow. It’s harder to get around.

Wrap-Up

I’ve found that editing electronically is great for substantial changes, like changing the order of existing text. It’s also great if the document has to be passed around among multiple people.

If you’re like me, editing a hard copy helps when you want to look critically at the words themselves. It helps me consider the words I’ve chosen and whether I’m giving too much or too little information.

So my suggestion is to use both methods in your process for editing your own work if you have the time—and the printer paper. And remember to recycle . . .

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