Content Editing Quotes

When I write I know that I'm going to have to produce 40 percent more than I need.

Three hundred words in a day is not a lot. So much of it is thinking before writing. And then there's the cutting. But you do what you do and keep moving forward.

I think all documentaries leave out areas of people's lives. Which is good. There are areas that need not be explored.

Radio stations provided a service. They weeded out the stuff that no one should ever have to even think about. Now, they made mistakes and they made mistakes with me even but, by and large, they provided a service. They were an editor.

I love radio, but it's a very limited thing today. Everything has to be edited down to 3:59, and too bad if I didn't make my statement in three minutes and 59 seconds. Everybody's song has to make its point so quickly.

I always record far more than I can use. There's probably twice as much recorded as comes out.

When you adapt a book to a film, you take all the best parts and put them into an hour and 15 minutes and have to compromise on the characters.

For a long time, censors have been cutting my works. This makes me so sad, because many times they will tell me, 'Television won't like, so we have to cut, cut, cut!'

You would have to be naive to think you can appear on television and not have the material edited in some way.

I think most new writers are better off going with traditional publishers who will actually, at a minimum, edit your work, package it well, and market it for you.

Adapting a book is the most difficult thing because half the time you are wondering what to remove.

First, I was a fact checker for Zagat and then I was an editorial assistant for HarperCollins publishing house.

My stories take three or four months to fix, and it's not magical of a process. Ultimately it's a boring, difficult process. I write everything out, and then the parts I think are funny I put in bold. Then I go perform it. Then the parts that aren't funny, I unbold them.

I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

When I say 'publishing is the new literacy,' I don't mean there's no role for curation, for improving material, for editing material, for fact-checking material. I mean literally, the act of putting something out in public used to be reserved in the same way.

If a novelist has created vivid characters, interesting relationships, settings the reader can easily imagine, and intriguing stories, a screenwriter has loads to work with. The challenge comes with deciding what to cut and what to keep.

While there are certainly food-focused content out there on the Web and on TV, most of this content need to weave through many layers of editing before it reaches the viewer.

When you do a piece of journalism, you may have to cut away 95 percent of what you are experiencing.

When you see 'editor' on a book, there are many permutations of what that title can mean.

Finding the fine line between satisfying a daytime TV audience and an afternoon radio audience. That involved editing down my delivery to under an hour. I've been blessed to have great producers and a great staff to achieve that. I have a small team but they're very efficient.

There are two kinds of editors, those who correct your copy and those who say it's wonderful.

An incinerator is a writer's best friend.

I'm not a writer, but I'm very good at editing. That's my specialty. I can read something and tell you everything that's wrong with it and what's great about it and what needs to change, but it's hard for me to organize my thoughts.

What helps change bad writing into mediocre writing is editing. Editing is in bad shape in print journalism, and is in virtually nonexistent shape in online journalism.

My great strength as an editor, I believe, is structure: I know how to reorder a piece, I know how to reach into a jumbled story and extract the important narrative. And I can do both of these things very fast. I also think I've become better at cutting text. You don't always relish it, of course, but by now I know how to distill something without sacrificing its essence.