I learned about the concept of sweep edits from Joanna Wiebe’s talk at a Business of Software conference. The basic idea is that when you edit a piece, you pick one kind of thing to fix and do only that in a sweep. Then, you go back to the beginning and pick another problem and do a new sweep.

I hired an editor to help me with Swimming in Tech Debt, and I’m looking through the revisions and suggestions and trying to figure out a process for making the next draft. I was talking to someone about this earlier, and then I remembered that I should do sweep editing. I do this for blog posts, but for some reason, it didn’t occur to me right away when I got the edit back. The revisions and comments beckoned me to address them serially, but I should not do that.

Here is what I think my sweeps will be

1. Make factual corrections. The editor might have inadvertently changed the meaning of something with a change. I want to get the text back to being accurate.
2. Address comments. The editor made suggestions and I need to just go through each comment and decide what to do. I need to either reject the comment or add it to a todo list. I’ll resolve the comments that don’t need more writing and leave in the ones that do.
3. Relate the text to my central metaphor of swimming rather than drowning.
4. Read it aloud. I want to make sure it still sounds like me.

After this, I will have a list of things I need to write, so I’ll do that list one by one. I will try to group them into sweeps that are of a similar type and then amend the above list to make it easier for the next chapter.

I am sure that this list is wrong, but it’s a starting point for now.