Similar to rainbow editing, highlight editing zeros-in more on your manuscript.You’re not marking up your plot and characters with various colors, you looking more into mechanics and the smaller details.
In rainbow editing, you’re marking up your plot, characters, and setting with various colors, taking an in-depth approach to your story.you looking more into mechanics and the smaller details.
In highlight editing, you’re looking more into mechanics and the smaller details.
You could use rainbow editing for this as well, but I find highlighting to be easier and you can use both in the same draft.
Your manuscript will look gorgeous if you do.
Replacements
Use highlight editing when you want to replace certain words, sentences, or phrases in your novel. Use different colored highlighters for different things to swap out later. For example, assign different colors to look for:
- Cliches
- Vocabulary (add stronger words)
- Repetitive words or phrases
Work towards making those phrases more specific and concrete.
The “W” Questions
Some small details don’t matter, but others do. It all helps out with the background of the story and gives the readers a little bit more to go on as they delve deeper into the story.
Ask yourself these questions as though you, the reader, is in the story:
- Where are we?
- Who are we?
- When are we?
- How do things look?
- What time period are we in? What time of year?
- Is it day or night?
- What’s the weather like?
Some details, like the weather, can be small, but they can add a lot to the story and allow the reader to really feel as though they’re in your world.
Use a highlighter to answer these questions (and similar questions you can think of). If you can’t find the answers in the text, then your reader won’t know the answer. Make a note and ask if it’s really important to add. If it is, add it in somewhere you won’t disrupt the flow.
In Conclusion
Highlighters are a lot of fun and they’re made to make things stand out to us. When editing, you want to make notes of things to add, delete, or change. Highlighting these things in different colors is not only easy (and pretty!) but it’ll save you some extra editing of later drafts and will be easy to look back on later.
Have you used this method before? Do you do anything similar? Let me know in the comments below!
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