Editing your own writing

Self-editing is difficult for a specific reason: you read what you intended rather than what is on the page, and the brain supplies the missing meaning automatically.

Separating the tasks

The foundational principle.

Writing and editing use different modes and interfere with each other.

Writing while editing produces slow, self-conscious prose and frequently produces nothing at all, since the critical faculty stops the generative one.

Which means writing a complete rough draft first, then editing it, is faster than doing both at once — even though it feels less efficient.

And it means the first draft is allowed to be bad, which is what makes it possible to produce.

The levels of editing

Which should be done in order.

Structural: is the argument in the right order, is anything missing, is anything unnecessary?

Doing this last, after polishing sentences, wastes the polishing on material that gets cut.

Paragraph: does each paragraph do one thing, and is its point in the first sentence?

Sentence: clarity, length, rhythm, active voice.

Word: precision, unnecessary words, jargon, repetition.

Proofreading: spelling, punctuation, consistency, formatting.

Working from largest to smallest prevents wasted effort.

Creating distance

The techniques that make errors visible.

Time: leaving it overnight is the most effective, since the memory of what you intended fades.

Reading aloud, which reveals long sentences, awkward constructions and missing words immediately — the mouth catches what the eye does not.

Changing the appearance: different font, different size, printed rather than on screen, which disrupts the familiarity that causes skimming.

Reading backwards, sentence by sentence from the end, which breaks the narrative flow and forces attention on each sentence individually — particularly effective for proofreading.

And having it read aloud to you by text-to-speech, which is now available on most devices and which is unforgiving of anything clumsy.

The specific checks

A working list.

Does the first paragraph contain the point?

Could any paragraph be deleted without loss?

Is every sentence necessary?

Are there sentences over about twenty-five words that could be split?

Is the passive voice concealing who did something?

Are there hedges and intensifiers to cut?

Is any word repeated closely, unintentionally?

Is the tone consistent throughout?

Does it end deliberately rather than stopping?

And is the required action explicit?

Cutting

Where most improvement comes from.

A useful discipline: cut ten per cent, arbitrarily, and see whether anything is lost.

Usually nothing is.

The things that go first: preamble, restatement, hedging, examples that duplicate other examples, and the sentence explaining what you are about to say.

Keeping a separate file of cut material makes cutting psychologically easier and the material is almost never restored.

What spellcheckers miss

The errors that survive.

Correctly spelled wrong words: form for from, their for there, complement for compliment.

Missing words, particularly small ones, which the reading brain supplies automatically.

Duplicated words across a line break.

Wrong names and numbers.

Inconsistent formatting and terminology.

And errors in headings and captions, which are read less carefully during editing and more prominently by readers.

Using tools

Sensibly.

Grammar and style checkers catch some things and produce a great deal of noise, and their suggestions should be assessed rather than accepted.

Readability scores are crude and are a useful signal when very high.

Text-to-speech is genuinely useful.

Search for your own known habits — a word you overuse, a construction you default to.

And find-and-replace for consistency of terminology and spelling conventions.

Getting someone else to read it

Which is worth more than any technique.

Another reader has none of your assumptions and will find what you cannot.

Ask a specific question — "is the argument clear?" or "does the opening work?" — since "any thoughts?" produces line edits rather than useful feedback.

Ask them to note where they got confused or bored, which is more useful than what they would change.

And resist explaining what you meant, since the reader's confusion is data about the text rather than a misunderstanding to correct.

Knowing when to stop

The other skill.

Editing has diminishing returns and can continue indefinitely.

Set a limit: two passes for routine work, more for anything consequential.

A document that is clear and slightly imperfect and sent is worth more than one being polished indefinitely.

And the difference between the fourth and fifth pass is generally invisible to anyone but you.

Reading it backwards

A technique that sounds eccentric and works.

Reading the final draft one sentence at a time from the end forwards removes the momentum that carries you past errors.

Because the sense of the argument is broken, you see the sentence rather than the meaning you intended.

It is slow and it is only worth doing on a final pass of something short and important.

Keeping the cuts

A practical habit that makes cutting easier.

Move deleted passages into a separate file rather than deleting them.

Which removes most of the reluctance to cut, since nothing is lost.

In practice you will almost never retrieve anything, which is itself informative.

And the file occasionally contains the opening of the next piece.