Editing: 'You' Don't Got What You Need

Rules for Writers chapters 13 and 23 will be a great interest for editing essays to have a consistent voice, to have a consistent point of view, and to have agreement in person, among other things.

Our sentences create specific lenses for how we look our essay subjects. If we vary from sentence to sentence our point of view, we are shifting too much and distorting the view through that lens. In short, how we are looking at something becomes blurry and noisy. 

Biz Markie's "You got what I need" is a horrible ear worm, right? You may or may not agree, so I probably shouldn't tell you how to feel. Also, Biz Markie gets away with it why: audience and purpose (and genre). His audience is a young lady, and his purpose is to swoon her!

Our audience is not one person. Our purpose is to never swoon (okay, maybe a little) the audience...

How to edit? 

• Your job is to replace the 'you' or its form with the proper noun/pronoun...
• IF only replacing the word doesn't help with the sentence's grammar, you will need to rewrite the entire sentence, with new clauses and syntax. 

Who/What should replace you? ...How do I know? (pages 134 & 215 in RW)

• Here are a few ways to look for the word(s) that need to replace the 'you'  (or your, yours, etc.)

• the essay subject OR
• the sentence's subject OR 
• the paragraph's subject (look at that topic sentence)
• the subject or the object of that last sentence...because that will force you to come back from the dark side of using second person when you were using third person POV when you started that next sentence!