Editing is an essential part of writing, but it can be difficult to evaluate and refine your own work. That’s why it’s helpful to have some go-to practices for taking content you’ve written through the editing phase. Below are a few of the editing practices I’ve found most useful over the years:
Let it breathe. Once you’re finished, save your work, and set it aside for a day or two. When you’ve just finished a draft, you’re too close to it to see it clearly. Taking some time away from it will allow you to begin editing with fresh eyes. If, for some reason, you don’t have a day or two to spare, step away from your computer for at least a couple of hours and then come back to start editing. Any time you can spend letting that first draft breathe will make for a more successful, more thorough editing phase.
Print it out. You’ll be surprised at what a difference simply reading your draft in a different format will make for your editing. Once you’re holding those pages in your hand, you’ll instantly see errors or necessary wording changes that had slipped by you while you were editing on screen. Printing your draft will also give you a brief resting period as you wait for your printer to spit out your pages, which will help you greet them with fresher eyes.
Read what you wrote out loud. Either while working through your hard copy draft or as a final-ish on-screen editing pass, reading your copy aloud can be a great way to catch wording redundancies, awkward sentence structure, and poor phrasing. Even if we don’t always succeed at writing them (at least not in first draft mode), we all know what a clear, concise sentence sounds like. That’s why reading aloud can be so valuable.
Hearing what you’ve written allows you to more easily catch sentences and wording that isn’t as clear as you thought it was when you first wrote it. It’s a valuable practice that allows you to hear the need for wording changes that simply silently reading a draft won’t allow you to catch.
Start at the end. This might not seem like sound advice, but hear me out. I’ve found in my own copywriting work that starting at the end of a piece is a great way to catch typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors that had previously slipped by me. Essentially, it’s yet another way to see what you’ve written with fresh eyes.
What I do is start at the beginning of the last paragraph of whatever I’ve written and then work towards the beginning of the piece, going paragraph by paragraph. It’s obviously not the best way to see if the overall structure of your piece is working, but you might find that you do catch discrepancies or other flow issues that you hadn’t previously noticed. Starting at the end of your piece is also a great way to do a proofreading pass if you don’t have a day or two to let your draft sit between edits.
Honor your word count. A great directive for your first round of edits is your goal word count. If your content is significantly over your word count, I recommend using your first round of edits to cut the extra and refine what’s left. You’ll likely need to go back and forth between taking a ten-thousand foot view of your piece and a more detail-oriented view of specific sentences and words.
If your piece is significantly under your goal word count, carefully look at whether you’ve successfully gotten the message across to your target audience. If not, you may need to add to the piece or even change the format of the piece. Maybe your blog post is better as a social media post or maybe your ebook is better as a case study. Regardless, don’t simply dismiss a pre-set word count when your first draft word count is off the mark. Use it to guide your editing process.
Seek out a second pair of eyes. At the end of the day, you’re only going to be able to edit your piece up to a certain point. Once you’ve read your own writing over and over again, it becomes too familiar and your ability to catch mistakes or poor messaging wanes. That’s when it’s time to call in a second pair of eyes. Whether a family member, business partner, trusted customer, or friend, an objective reader can give you feedback on what resonated for them, what they didn’t quite understand, typos you might have missed, and so on. If you want to reduce the chance that they’ll try to protect your feelings by not giving honest feedback, you might create a list of questions for them to consider as they read through the content.
For more helpful guidelines on editing your own work, The Write Life provides a great list of 25 tips for tightening your copy and includes a printable checklist. My parting words on the matter are this: don’t skip editing. It is essential. Your first draft is exactly that–a draft. Even simply taking one editing pass will greatly improve what you’ve written. When you set out to write content, always factor in time for editing so that you aren’t rushed or tempted to skip the process.