Most "how to edit" advice boils down to the same tired truisms. Read aloud. Kill your darlings. Keep the reader in mind.

These tropes are technically true, but not helpful for actually improving your writing, or developing the skills and judgment required to become an editor. They are necessary but not sufficient for making content good: you could follow their advice to the letter and still walk away with bad content.

I built this course to answer a simple question: How do you actually edit? When a skilled editor reviews an article, what are they looking for? What are they mechanically doing, beyond fixing typos and bad grammar? What heuristics do they apply? What frameworks do they use?

I wanted to subject the editing process to the same level of interrogation as other parts of content marketing, to introspect into the twelve years I've spent writing and editing and actually teach people how to edit.

And you should learn how to edit.

As a writer, your career trajectory hinges on the cumulative successes of your articles. Editing provides a mechanism for systematically improving the performance of your writing, making success—in terms of traffic, resonance, and revenue— a little more predictable with every article.

Editing creates beneficial power dynamics, allowing you to move beyond "just writing" into positions of influence, developing your experience in strategy and team leadership in the process.

It helps you prepare for a world where generative AI has created a sea of commodity content, allowing you to become the skilled arbiter of content quality in charge of shaping and refining AI content.

Most important of all: editing helps you build your own "content taste," a sense of judgment and quality that you can carry with you into every article and every role.

With those benefits in mind, this course will teach you how to:
 

Hey there! I'm a content marketer that's worked with companies including Google, GoDaddy, Clearbit, Wistia and Algolia. I've been a writer, content strategist, team lead, marketing director, VP, CMO, and agency co-founder.

I'm currently Director of Content Marketing at Ahrefs. Before that I was CMO at Animalz, where I managed and wrote the Animalz blog, famous for its thought leadership content. I've ghostwritten for founders, execs and well-known tech companies, and overseen content strategy for many more. I've worked with dozens of writers and edited (and improved) hundreds of articles.

I've written a lot about the art and science of great writing. Here are some of my most popular articles:

If you have any questions, or just want to connect, drop me an email: ryan@ryanlaw.me.