How to Edit Your Own Writing (Recommended 3-Step Process)

How to Edit Your Own Writing (Recommended 3-Step Process)

Table of contents

I used to dread emails from my editor. The pink strike-throughs of the Google Docs suggestion mode, the pale yellow of the comment box, and the inquisitive questions all over my work — had me breaking into a sweat in the middle of the night.

Always use a tool to edit and get suggestions

Why you need to self-edit

Other than the fact that a self-edited piece makes your work appear more polished, it also:

Edits you can avoid upfront

There are certain edits that you don’t need a complete round of editing for. By following three simple techniques, you can avoid these entirely and save yourself at least two hours of editing time.

Here are the edits followed by how you can eliminate them:

1. Brand-specific edits

Know the feeling when your editor changes ‘empathize’ to ‘empathise’ or removes an oxford comma?

You can avoid all of these edits by paying closer attention to the voice and tone guide provided by the brand you work with.

But with a number of brands on your plate, how do you remember the edit guidelines for each?

Here’s what I do:

I make a checklist and paste it on top of each of my drafts—before I begin writing. This forces me to revisit the style guide every time I write.

2. Spelling errors

Spelling errors and typos crop up naturally when you’re passionately typing away at your keyboard. These errors are human. But they make for a very poor reading experience.

Use a tool like Wordtune to ensure typos get fixed as soon as they occur.

3. Uncited sources

You might have had the source for a stat open in your browser, but might have forgotten to add it to the draft.

This has happened to me on more occasions than one.

Here’s my hack on avoiding it:

Click ‘Control/Command + F’ on your doc and search for:

This will highlight all the places you’ve used external research, and you can quickly scan through the text to check whether you’ve cited sources.

Beyond generic ‘tips for editing’

But how do you actually edit impactfully and holistically? Make edits beyond using synonyms and adding commas?

In the next section, I introduce the structure that helped me minimize the number of initial edits I got from my editor. It also helped me get rid of that third round of edits altogether!

‘Edit like every word costs $5’ — you’ve probably heard this advice dished out a lot while self-editing. But what does it actually mean?

To self-edit effectively, you don’t need a list of generic tips or a checklist. You need structures to understand:

To make sure you get ahead of these (and wow your editor), look at editing like a three-step process:

Step 1: Developmental Edit
Step 2: Copy Edits
Step 3: Polishing

Step 1: developmental edits

Developmental edits take into account the big picture. They gauge whether your piece is in line with the writing brief and the final goal.

Here’s how you can quickly do a round of developmental edits:

1. Look at all your headings and sub-headings in isolation.

As an example, let’s look at the headings in this blog on project management for creative teams.

H1: The Complete Guide to Creative Project Management H2: Why Creative Teams Need Project Management
H2: Essential Elements of Effective Project Management
H3: Initiation
H3: Planning
H3: Execution
H3: Creative Sign-off
H3: Post-project Analysis
H2: How does ‘creative’ project management differ from ‘traditional’ project management
H2: Project Management Best Practices
H2: Tools for Creative Project Management

After looking at this structure, you’ll realize that the order of the sections doesn’t flow intuitively.

Before you get into the specifics, it would be more logical to explain how creative project management differs from traditional project management.

Why?

It eases skeptical readers who might have thought there isn’t much difference between the two.

Secondly, the tools for creative project management should be given out before listing the best practices. This is because the best practices might explain why and when project management tools should be used.

This is what an outline after developmental edits will look like:

H1: The Complete Guide to Creative Project Management
H2: Why Creative Teams Need Project Management
H2: How does ‘creative’ project management differ from ‘traditional’ project management
H2: Essential Elements of Effective Project Management
H3: Initiation
H3: Planning
H3: Execution
H3: Creative Sign-off
H3: Post-project Analysis
H2: Tools for Creative Project Management
H2: Project Management Best Practices

2. Ask, “does my writing answer the ‘why’ this topic brings up?”

If you’re not addressing the reader's questions, you’ll lose them way before you get to the heart of your article. But if you lead with their questions and then walk them through the answers, you’ll gain their trust.

Let’s look at how to address reader intent with an example:

When writing ‘The Complete Guide to Creative Project Management’, you should first answer why creative teams need project management in the first place.

In another example, if you’re writing a blog called ‘Online Banking for Cash-Conscious Millennials’, you should first address what traditional banks lack that millennials seek in online banking.

This advice is also true for each sub-section.

Answer why you’ve added a section in the first place.

3. Check whether you’re consistently addressing one audience.

This is the part where I used to struggle the most. I’d be talking to one person at the beginning of a piece and another person in the next section.

4. Review the action you’re requesting from your readers.

Are your Calls-to-Action strategic?
Did you talk about them throughout the narrative and then request action?

For example, in this blog for sales managers:

Deal management is tricky.
You can spend hours organizing deals by size, origin, and salesperson, only to end up with a more complex overview than when you started.
And even the best tools don’t help because they’re highly complex themselves.
What does help is starting with the basics. Getting to know each of your salespeople and the deals they’re responsible for—is the first step.

Step 2: copy edits

This step is where we get granular. After looking at the overall structure of the piece, we look at the construction of each paragraph.

1. Flow:

Check if sentences flow from one to the next without friction. Then, do the same for paragraphs.

This is best done after letting your first drafts sit for a bit.

2. Objections:

If your piece reads like a dialogue, you need to build objections into your narrative. But this needs to be done strategically.

3. Takeaways

Make sure that you add a takeaway at the end of every section. This helps your readers execute on your advice as they read the piece.

Step 3: polishing

Once the developmental and copy edits are in place, you can start proof-reading and polishing your piece.

Check for:

The most common edits

These are the most common edits I, and a number of other writers, have gotten from their editors frequently.

1. Edit: Not answering the ‘why’ or ‘how’:

Unedited example: 'Email marketing is one of the most reliable methods for increasing brand awareness'.
Edited example: 'Email marketing is one of the most reliable methods for increasing traffic to your ecommerce store because people check their email 7 times a day.'

2. Edit: Redundancy

3. Edit: Poor readability

And finally

Even the most thorough round of self-editing cannot replace a good editor, but it can build credibility and authority. If you do this yourself, your editor won’t have to waste time highlighting silly mistakes and can actually instruct you on more crucial aspects of narrative-building.