Basic Tips For Self-Editing
Many freelancers are self-publishing these days. They write and edit their own blogs. They write and edit their own e-books. They do not have editors checking their work for accuracy and quality.
The pressure to produce good, clean copy is greater than ever before. Self-editing is critical skill for freelance writers.
Here are some basic suggestions:
WRITE, THEN EDIT
Making quick fixes on the fly is OK. But stopping to rework paragraph after paragraph turns writing into arduous work. Complete the rough draft, then start the editing process for real.
SET YOUR WORK ASIDE
If you are writing a deadline piece, walk away and take a quick break before starting the final editing process. If you are writing a longer piece or working on a book chapter, come back the next day.
“By doing this,” Ali Luke wrote on the WriteToDone.com site, “you make it easier to see your work afresh. You’ll come up with new ideas, and you’ll find that you can spot chapters that don’t fit, plot holes, inconsistent characterization and other big-picture problems.
READ YOUR WORK ON A DIFFERENT FORMAT
Mistakes you miss in a Word document may become more glaring when you print out the copy or plug it into a content management system. Bloggers should re-read their post in the “preview” format and again after publishing them because typos, missing words or incorrect words may jump out at them.
Some writers prefer to print out their stories and edit the hard copy with a pen.
EDIT FOR STRUCTURE, FLOW AND CONTENT FIRST
Do the big picture work before getting caught up in the detail work. “Too often, writers start their editing by polishing up every sentence – and then end up cutting out huge chunks of their material later,” Luke wrote. “It’s much more efficient to do your big picture editing first.”
READ YOUR STORY OUT LOUD
As Jodee Redmond wrote on the Freelance Writing Gigs site, this can help “to get a feel for its rhythm. This technique is a good way to determine where natural breaks in sentences should be, especially commas.”
CUT OUT 10 PERCENT OF YOUR WORDS
Weed out empty adjectives. Make meandering sentences more direct. Shift from passive to active phrasing. Cut out repetitive material. Pare down run-on quotes. Write tight and bright, even in long-form work.
ONE IDEA PER SENTENCE
Reel in your writing. Maintain your flow. Do not go off on a tangent in mid-sentence.
USE SPELL-CHECK, BUT DOUBLE-CHECK
Spell-check software is great, but it won’t prevent your from misusing words. It should catch repeated words, but it may not flag missing words. “Sometimes, spell-check will pick up on words that are actually correct – mine has some bizarre ideas about “its” and “it’s” – so don’t blindly follow every suggestion,” Luke wrote.
READ YOUR WORDS BACKWARDS
Start at the bottom and work your way up sentence by sentence. That keeps you from racing ahead and seeing what you intended to write rather than what your actually typed.
“If you find reading backwards too awkward, then try reading s-l-o-w-l-y,” Luke wrote. “That might mean running a pencil along each line as you read, or increasing the font size so that you don’t see so many words at a time on your screen.”
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