It takes courage to pour out one’s imagination or knowledge on paper, and no manuscript is born flawless; the process of relaying thoughts, of transforming raw ideas to words can be overwhelming. A skilled editor is able to identify and preserve your one-of-a-kind style, and chisel your work so that it mirrors the vision in your head, all the while ensuring linguistic correctness and technical quality.
A good rule to have while self-editing is to detach and try to treat your writing as if it belonged to somebody else. There are staples like getting rid of weak adjectives and verbs, reading out loud, or hunting down repetitions — not to mention tackling bad grammar — but profound editing must take things way further. I always ask myself the same questions I use to edit other people’s content: who am I editing for, what kind of a recipient? What exactly is the author’s purpose here and have they achieved it? If not, why? If yes, was it with clarity? Does the tone correspond with the intended message? How will the readers understand a piece of information or picture a scene, and is the answer to this question in compliance with the author’s intentions? And so on, and so forth – the list is long and flexible.
And yes, if I edit your content, you are getting the Oxford comma. :-)
ORIGINAL
Bijou means Jewel in French . Bijou is also a very beautiful girl who tends to get pidgin hold as exotic looking or rare. She is also super smart and her academics are years above grade level. Having never met her mother as she died giving birth to her, Bijou was raised by her grandmother who she calls “Gigi” Gigi writes for living, using a pseudonym and for some strange reason they tend to move around a lot. Bijou has also been home schooled most of her life. This is her first year trying out regular school.
Bijou is also plagued by a certain ability which threatens to overwhelm her. Her coping mechanism is to shuffle a deck of cards. As an empath she can read the emotions and feel them off of other people. Most people are typicals who can be read real easily by the non typicals are not so easy.Needless to say such a unique person tends to stand out. Upon her first day of school she befriends Sebastian and his twin sister Amina.
Skimming through the first two paragraphs of the review, I marked the areas requiring immediate technical improvement and noted answers to the guiding questions. The author writes about a YA novel on a website dedicated to book lovers, so we already have a clearly defined audience; in the excerpt shown, his purpose is to describe the plot and the main characters without "spoilers". As much as his tone is appropriate for a YA recipient, poor grammar, frequent repetitions, and unvarying sentence structures do not convey the message well.
EDITED
Bijou’s (“jewel” in French) exotic beauty is more of a curse than a blessing. The extraordinarily talented girl had been raised and home-schooled by her grandmother, Gigi, who found success writing under a pseudonym. It’s time, however, for Bijou to give a regular school a chance — but it’s not just her spectacular looks or wits that will inevitably have her stand out of the crowd.
Bijou is an empath — a person capable of not only reading, but also feeling other people’s emotions. This gift, while taxing, seems to be harmless enough… as long as nobody knows about it. Bijou’s first day of school gets off on the right foot as she befriends twins, Sebastian and Amina.