Understanding editing

Very rarely does writing come out finished in one go: take a break, come back with fresh eyes, check spelling, punctuation, grammar, formatting and presentation, and seek others' feedback. Eleanor Estes: survey your work 'as though he were a stranger to it'.

SMS and chat lingo make people casual about rules; that can work in informal settings or in creative writing that plays with language on purpose — Meg Cabot's text-speak, Moni Mohsin's Lahore English, Nissim Ezekiel's 'The Patriot', a chat-room story.

Such deviations can be deliberate and fruitful; editing is needed where they are not.

Editing works at two levels: proofreading (spelling, punctuation, grammar, formatting) and a higher level of content — style, concepts and the organisation of information.

Tools: dictionaries, a thesaurus (to avoid overusing familiar words), grammar and usage guides, and computer spelling and grammar checks — but never accept every machine suggestion blindly; context decides.