Editing Your Train of Thought - Part One

By Katy Kauffman

The train stopped. Three suitcases off? Check. Three Kauffmans off? Check.

My family scurried to the next train.

Three suitcases aboard? Check. Three Kauffmans aboard? Wait, where was Katy? There, she was fine. All together.

When I was ten years old, my family had an adventure in the Swiss Alps, and more than anything, my mom didn’t want to leave me behind. The trains stopped and started at the stations so quickly, there was a slight chance that one of us might have a semi-permanent stay in the mountains.

“Whatever happens,” my mom told my dad, “you stay with Katy. Even if the luggage leaves without us.” (But we all made it. Luggage too.)

As writers, we might have a tendency to set the reader on a particular train track, only to ask them to jump trains mid-chapter or mid-article. If our train of thought decides it wants to morph into a different train, we need to slow down and look closely at how we are explaining our main idea.

5 Questions to Evaluate Your Train of Thought

It’s easy to get sidetracked as we develop our nonfiction chapters and articles, so let’s ask ourselves these questions as we write.

1. What is my main idea for this piece of writing?
2. Can I summarize each paragraph with a phrase, and those phrases show that my train of thought is traveling in a straight line?
3. If I only read the first lines of my paragraphs, can I easily track the path of my flow of thought?  
4. Does my train jump the tracks to explore an unrelated idea?
5. Do I arrive at my “destination” on time, not having too many stories, explanations, or details, i.e., my writing is streamlined? 

Creating a crisp, clean, and appealing flow of thought is one of the hardest challenges we have as writers. Yet it makes for a meaningful and picturesque ride for the reader because we have included the best details to make our point and we have left out distracting material. The reader can safely explore our world of ideas and principles without having to jump trains and possibly get left behind, never arriving at the correct destination.

Be sure to join us next week for part two as Katy gives us five steps for building a powerful train of thought.

Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash

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Five questions to evaluate our train of thought as writers. via @KatyKauffman28 (Click to tweet.)

Katy Kauffman is an award-winning author, an editor of Refresh Bible Study Magazine, and a co-founder of Lighthouse Bible Studies. She loves connecting with writers and working alongside them in compilations, such as Feed Your Soul with the Word of God, Collection 1 which is a 2020 Selah Awards finalist. She runs The Lighthouse Connection, a monthly writers’ newsletter including writing tips, inspiration to write, and news of submission opportunities.

In addition to online magazines, Katy’s writing can be found at CBN.com, thoughts-about-God.com, and three blogs on writing. She loves to spend time with family and friends, create hand lettering designs with My Artsy Tribe, and plant flowers all year long. Connect with her at her blog, Winning the Victory, and on Facebook and Twitter.