Pudovkin’s 5 Editing Techniques from Evan Richards on Vimeo.
Contrast
Placing two different shots next to each other that are vastly different in some way. This could be visually such as a changes in brightness, saturation or shapes, of it could be in subject or emotion – happy to sad, rich to poor for example. These drastic changes often make the narrative part of the brain come up with an idea or opinion to justify the change.
Parallelism
Here an image or idea is used to bridge to separate scenes. Graphically you could cut from a moon being sliced by clouds to an eye cut by a razor. Both of these share the visual of a circular object being cut by a thin line. This could also be done with an object or idea such as a shot of cows grazing in a ranch to a juicy hamburger both share the idea of a cow and viewers make the connection between the two in their minds.
Symbolism
Cutting between two scenes with the intent of creating a symbolic link between the two. For instance a shot of ants from over head cuts to a helicopter shot of a city. Here viewers will make the symbolic connections of the worker ants to the people in the city going to their jobs and think about how insignificant we are. If instead, the shot of the ants is replaced with an animation of electricity traveling through a circuit board the viewers will connect the precision of the circuit’s engineering with the order of city.
Simultaneity or cross cutting
This technique is often used to show two events happening at the same time. A classic from action movies is the police rushing to the aid of an action hero who needs to defuse a bomb.
Leit Motif
This is often used as a musical term but can also be done visually across a composition. It creates a pattern for our brain to latch on to and hightens a particular idea for the viewer. For instance, a slimy character could always be shot with some sort of reptile in the background or in the costume design. Or a character representing the devil could always exit the scene by going down stairs.