The hour edit: Turning bad writing into ok writing when you're pressed for time

Suppose you have a crappy draft of a dissertation chapter, an op-ed, a magazine article, a journal article, or a Substack post, and you want to improve it. (Maybe you have to show it to your advisor or send it to your editor.) But you don’t have much time, maybe just an hour. So you’re not trying to make it perfect, just better. Here are four suggestions.

What makes me competent to advise you on this? I’m tempted to say that I’ve critiqued countless papers for students, friends, and colleagues, and giving feedback is a big part of my job as editor of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. But that’s not much of an answer—the fact that I do it a lot doesn’t mean I do it well.

A better answer is that none of the following tips are mine. I’ve had my own drafts worked on countless times by terrific editors from outlets like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and I’ve tried my best to pay attention to what they told me. Here are some of the points that kept coming up.

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1. You should probably delete your first paragraph, maybe your first few. If it’s a long piece, you might want to delete the first page or so

The cliché here is the undergraduate essay that starts with something like “Since the dawn of time, scientists have been interested in the mysteries of the human mind.” You can cut out that sucker without a second thought.

But it’s not just beginners.