Tips for Editing Your Own Work
- Randy
- May 22, 2020
- 2 min read
Before submitting a piece of writing to a publisher—and certainly before it’s published!—it is important to have your writing reviewed by a competent editor. We’ll talk about the hows and whys of that assertion another time; for today, I want to focus on how you can best edit your own work if you can’t afford an editor or aren’t quite at the stage you want to hire one.
1) Read it out loud
You might feel ridiculous, but reading aloud can help you catch errors that you’d skip right over while reading silently. After all, proofreading is a very different skill from general reading for comprehension and entertainment. When you read aloud, it forces you to slow down and, usually, to read each word. Where you might fill in a missing word you expect to see when reading silently, the omission is likely to cause you to stumble when trying to read the same passage aloud. This has the added bonus of helping you hear if anything sounds silly or awkward to your ear that seemed fine when you read it silently.
2) Change the formatting
Switch up the size, font, color and/or style of the text if you’re trying for a real proofread. Adjusting how the words look can trick your brain into not autocorrecting what’s in front of you into what you know it’s supposed to be. The biggest drawback to editing one’s own work, even for trained and accomplished editors, is simply being too familiar with the manuscript. If I wrote something, I know what it should say, and the human brain is more than capable of glossing right over spelling and punctuation errors by filling in what it knows ought to be there.
3) Take a break
Don’t try proofreading something you just finished writing, no matter how great you think it is. A bit of temporal distance will allow you to bring an even slightly different perspective to the words, which will help you decide whether what you wrote is really as good (or bad) as you thought when you first got it onto the page.
Again, the best way to make sure your writing is ready to submit or publish is to hire a professional. But short of that, these tips can at least help you catch more errors than you would otherwise.
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