Making Edit Cuts on Words and Syllables

You don’t always have to make your cuts on the first word of a sentence, or an individual word; sometimes you can cut on a syllable within a word. Sometimes it’s easier to cut on the 2nd or 3rd word in a sentence, or even cut on a syllable within one of the words.

It all comes down to the performance of the voice you’re editing.

Meaning, some participants:

• …will make a mistake and then back up and start again by repeating a few of the same words before continuing on. This makes it easy to edit out their flub.
• …will laugh when repeating those few repeated words. This makes it almost impossible to edit at all because the result will sound really awkward; for instance after cutting out the flub, half of a sentence will be spoken clearly and calmly, and then the second half will be said while laughing. The listener will be confused and has no idea what happened. Usually in those cases I don’t make any edits at all; I will leave the flub because that’s better than an awkward edit.
• …will mess up the end of a word, then when repeating the word they mess up the beginning of the word, so now you have to try to make your cut on a syllable within that word in order to use the good beginning and the good ending of that word. Sometimes this works really well, and sometimes it’s tough to make it sound natural.

I’m sure there are many other examples of this type of ninja editing.

Have you made any tricky edits lately?

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