Rachel and I worked together to edit our profile pieces. All editing aside, I was interested to read her piece because it was about a local apparel company I had considered writing about myself, but decided against it. I learned a lot from her article!
I think we also learned a lot just from talking with each other about how we both tend to write how we talk, how hard it is to work against an 800 word limit, and how we invariably uncover information while reporting that could be a story in and of itself.
As far as the technical elements of our editing session are concerned, I found the index cards helpful, but will probably not highlight adjectives and adverbs in future. For a compulsively literal person such as myself, the instruction to highlight all adjectives and adverbs results in a page that is almost entirely yellow, because you have highlighted words that are grammatically adjectives, but obviously cannot be taken away (ex: the “social” in social medial. So that was too much for me. But because I can be a little all over the place while editing (and writing), I appreciated how the index cards made me focus on only one or two lines at a time.
n.b.: there’s a difference between descriptive adjectives and those used to form compound nouns. So you don’t need to highlight social in “social media.”
(And yes, you’re paying me to be a pedant.)