Tricia Wooldridge is a professional author and editor. She recently did a webinar with us entitled “Self-Editing Techniques for Young Writers.” Here are our five main takeaways from the webinar! To learn about these topics in greater depth and detail, the full webinar can be viewed here.

Wooldridge’s number one tip for editing is: “Read your work out loud, then read it backward, sentence by sentence.” She offers five self-editing tricks to help young writers create leaner, more compelling narrative.

Trick One: Show, Don’t Tell.

“Telling depends on verbs that are not ‘active’.” To ascertain whether you’re telling or showing, ask yourself: Could you mime or mimic the action? She WAS, or she HAS are verbs that cannot be mimicked. This is telling. However, she RAN or she HELPED are actions that can be mimicked. This is showing.

Telling: Her eyes were blue but her hair was red.

Showing: Ginny tossed her fiery hair and glared ice-blue hatred at him.

Tricia’s Trick: Writing in passive tense (or telling instead of showing) often uses variations of “To be” and “To have.” Wooldridge recommends using the “Find” tool in your document to flag all of these forms of verbs, and then ask yourself if they can be replaced with active, non-passive verbs.

Kelly O’Laughlin is the author of “A Highly Sensitive Person’s Life” and host of a podcast by the same name. In Episode 19, she discusses the best careers for HSPs.

Finding the right career when you’re a highly sensitive person can be tricky. You may find a field that you love, but discover the daily application of your job makes you miserable, because it doesn’t honor your unique operating system. O’Laughlin helps HSPs honor their strengths, and weed out careers that don’t play to them.

In Episode 19, O’Laughlin tells us: “Highly sensitive people have a lot of great traits that are really beneficial in the workplace… HSPs are loyal and dedicated. They’re great listeners, detail-oriented, organized, fair. They’re independent and don’t need a lot of supervision. They’re able to deeply process and think about problems, and they’re sensitive to the needs and emotions of the people around them.”

On paper, these strengths mean you could technically be an HSP and be amazing at any job. But will that job fill you, or tear you down? It’s important to note that just because you CAN do a job and perform well, doesn’t mean you SHOULD.

Laura Karasinski is a designer. She is also an HSP, or a highly sensitive person. In her moving TED talk, Laura discusses what it means to be an HSP, and how she has learned to view her sensitivity as a superpower.

“Highly sensitive people.. [are born] with a genetic trait that is inherited, and processes sensory information differently.” There are 1.4 million HSPs in the world.

As a kid, Laura was called shy, anxious, cold, and dramatic. She was told to “toughen up” and “get over it” when she seemed to feel the world around her a little too strongly. Being highly sensitive can be akin to feeling the thrum of the universe in everything-- from high sensory situations such as walking in a crowd and feeling the energy of each individual press against you, to the more mundane, daily occurrences, like hearing the bass pounding through your neighbor’s walls more intensely, or being utterly drained by one conversation with that toxic friend. Even bright lights can feel invasive to HSPs.

Advice Laura offers other HSPs is to “Embrace your empathy… Empathy is the ability to feel feelings of other people, and to feel moods. Highly sensitive people can get super affected by the moods of other people, so much that we get sad when other people are sad, and super excited when other people are super excited. But also, it makes us tired.” Why? Because for HSPs, it takes a great deal of energy to process the energy and emotions of those around them. Because HSPs can get overwhelmed by these energies, they are often told to toughen up. This is not only disempowering, it besmirches what a gift having empathy is. Empathetic people make excellent leaders, as they notice everything, and can develop deep connections very quickly.