We’ve all been there: we’ve got a piece of text we’ve written that is going to be read by the general public, important prospects, or someone who you are trying to get (or keep) on-side. However, we keep reading through it and finding typos or errors that your word processor has decided to ignore (in its infinite wisdom).
Alternatively, you may not feel like you’re a natural writer or you may have dyslexia.
Whatever your situation, here are all of the tips in my arsenal to help you edit text more thoroughly and effectively. I hope this guidance will help you become a more confident and more thorough editor.
Number 1: Know Your End Goal
If you’re the kind of writer who finds themselves going into too much detail; pulling at and expounding on thematic threads willy-nilly; and generally oversharing, you’ll likely find it useful to refocus and re-centre on the end goal of the text.
What is the exact scope of the document? What information is essential, and what is just nice to have? What questions do you need to answer? What points do you have to persuade people on? Looking at your text through this lens might help you realise what parts of your text are essential, and what parts are surplus to requirements.
Number 2: Take a Break
A lot of professional writers swear by treating their text like a good steak: you need to let it rest before you start cutting it up.
I realise this might not be particularly great advice if you’ve got a particularly looming deadline but if you’re able, downing tools and going for a walk, or even leaving your work overnight and editing with fresh eyes in the morning is something I’ve certainly sworn by in the past.
Number 3: Eliminate Distractions – Especially Wordy Ones
This one might just be me, but if you’re in the habit of working with music or a podcast playing in the background, this might help you: switch the playlist to some non-vocal music, or just switch it off entirely.
Editing is quite a focus-heavy task, so I recommend doing so in relative silence (whatever that looks like for you) or with some quiet, non-vocal music in the background. Sadly, that means no podcasts for my pod-addicts out there!
Number 4: Read Your Work Out Loud
This one can be really useful, especially if you read it out loud to someone else. When I do this, I find it easier to spot a bit of a run-on sentence, identify a metaphor that’s outstaying its welcome, or simply to uncover missing words and common typos.
If you do read it out loud to someone else – especially someone who is interested or invested in what’s being said, they may have some constructive input to provide too.
Number 5: Take Care with Statistics, Numbers, and Dates
It’s all well and good poring over the words in your work, but numbers often do a lot of heavy lifting in professional writing – especially when it comes to report writing and persuasive writing. It therefore pays to double check that they’re right.
Personally, I’ve always been far more proficient with words than numbers, so I always double check anything numerical to make sure I’m portraying it correctly.
Number 6: Change the Way You Look at Your Work
If you’re been plugging away at a document in your word processor of choice, say in size 10 Helvetica font, for the entirety of the document’s life, your brain is naturally going to become accustomed to those words in that setting. And that’s not great for spotting little mistakes that often slip through the cracks.
One way to do this is to simply copy and paste the document into another word processor. This comes with the added benefit of using that other platform’s own error and spell checking measures, which might identify issues that your usual software has missed. To make the document seem even more different, you could play around with using different fonts, text sizes, and even page or screen layouts.
Another way of changing the way your work appears to your brain is to simply print it out with double line spacing, grab a red pen, and edit on paper. I find that I look at a document very differently when it is an actual physical object in meatspace rather than a document on a screen.
Number 7: Invest in an Editors’ Dictionary
This is just a quick one, but as a British English writer, I swear by my copy of the New Oxford Dictionary for Writers & Editors. It’s not so much about the definitions and more about getting the spelling and styling right. If you’re often wondering whether certain proper nouns start with capital letters or whether certain terms are hyphenated or not, this type of reference book is a gem.
Number 8: Eradicate Passive Voice
When you’re writing in a professional or academic setting, lots of people will tell you to avoid the passive voice. It often makes sentences longer and needlessly complex compared to the more direct active voice.
To give a quick example of active versus passive voice, compare the active “I’m doing the housework” with the passive “The housework is being done”.
One tongue in cheek way to tell whether a sentence or sentence fragment uses the passive voice is to add “…by zombies” to the end. If the sentence still makes sense, you’ve used the passive voice.
Going back to our example, the active “I’m doing the housework by zombies” makes less sense than “The housework is being done by zombies”. Unless you are actually doing housework in the vicinity of some zombies of course, in which case I would urge you to reprioritise.
Now, passive voice isn’t wrong, it’s just something you should probably keep to a minimum in order to maximise clarity. Here’s an awesome passive voice detector over at Datayse.
Number 9: Know When to Stop Editing
This can be a tough one for my fellow perfectionists, but sometimes you just have to know when good enough is good enough. I know that the advice “done is better than perfect” offers cold comfort sometimes, but it is true. Continuously nitpicking a document means that it’s never actually ever done, it becomes sort of open ended and you can’t progress onto other things.
If you’re watching this video, you’re likely already a fastidious writer and you care deeply about the writing you do. If you write similar documents on a regular basis, say it’s a monthly report or a regular blog that you create, you could try making note of how much time it takes you, and strive to keep to a reasonable average time every time you come to complete that writing task.
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