Editing Your Own Copy

Self-editing is a skill you aren’t born with, you learn it over time. It’s not easy to look critically at your own work, which is especially true when you’ve been slaving away at it all day long.

One of the best rules of thumb to follow when editing your own work is to put it away for the day and don’t look at it again until tomorrow. That gives you a fresh set of eyes to look at the work with in the morning and you are more likely to catch little mistakes and hard-to-spot errors. One thing you shouldn’t do is try to self-edit after just having worked on the piece–at least give yourself the benefit of sleeping on THAT edit and looking at it again fresh the following day.

In cases where you simply can’t afford the time to let the copy go until tomorrow, try reading the piece backwards from the end of the last paragraph to your opening line. This helps you catch spelling mistakes and punctuation issues. You’ll have to read it the right way around to catch poor usage, but when you do, try reading it aloud.