Editing Someone Else's Work

Editing is something I've been doing these days. Whether it's training material or something else, people ask me to edit them. It's been a while since I seriously did this for anything. Just this morning, I had to rewrite some paragraphs because I knew that it would be something too long if I didn't do it. The one who wrote the article was already very busy and I know that it was something he labored on for hours and he might not have the heart to edit it anymore.

Aiya. Editing sometimes makes me feel guilty because of the things I have to do. If it was something as simple as punctuation marks or some corrections to the spelling of words, I won't feel too bad. What I am talking about here is the guilt of changing someone's words for the sake of making an article direct to the point. (I thought I had a 'flowery' way with words, but no. Apparently, I don't.) This is in the context of online content and how urgent it is needed.

These days I think in terms of blog entries and news articles. Editing things for such purposes is not very easy either so I need to make decisions even before I ask them about it. Chances are some of them might get offended if they see how much I've taken out, especially because the word count matters. I am crossing my fingers that they will see why I had to do those things to their articles.

I must sleep soon though. This blog entry is just to say something related to writing and how much I worry about it.