Editing your own writing is a particularly difficult task. Your brain knows what you wanted and meant to say, and often fills in letters, words and occasionally whole sentences that aren’t, in fact, there, or are misplaced.
At Mustang, I’m fortunate enough to have several trusted pairs of eyes to look over my work to make sure I haven’t missed anything while passionately knocking out a press release or ad copy. But sometimes the luxury of someone else isn’t available, and “Well, I had to edit it myself” isn’t an excuse that will often fly.
Instead, here are five key tips to successfully editing your own work that should help eliminate the chance for error, embarrassment and excuses:
1. Read out loud
This won’t work if you’re writing a novel, but for anything less than a page, it’s a sure-fire way to catch awkward phrasings, misplaced words and typos. Reading out loud forces your brain into accountability, and is a generally good practice for smoother writing.
2. Print in a different font
This may sound unusual, but if you’re like me and are picky with your fonts, you probably write everything you do in the same one—and it’s probably Times New Roman. When it’s time to print it out (and you MUST print out your writing to effectively edit), print it out in Courier. I know it’s hideous, but it changes the letter spacing and therefore the placement of your words and sentences, rendering your eyes less familiar with the text.
3. Take time off
If you have the time, use it. Take an hour, a day, a week away from what you’ve written, and come at it with a fresh perspective.
4. Lower the word count
Brevity is often key in marketing materials, so cutting words may be beneficial anyway. But it also forces you to examine the placement of every word and sentence. If the word count is where it needs to be, copy and paste the writing into another document and try and lower it simply for the exercise itself. Examining your writing so closely should allow you to more easily catch errors.
5. Use spell/grammar check
It’s so easy that it’s often ignored. The little red and green squiggly lines come up as you type, so why bother to go through the arduous process of pressing the button? Well, programs like Word can occasionally be slow to squiggle, but more importantly, often times people and company names aren’t recognized and get the squiggly line, and so our eyes ignore this. But, lets say you’re writing a company name like “Valubankers,” and accidentally write “Valuebankers” instead. By pressing spell check and going through each case, you can “ignore” the correct “Valubankers” and the incorrectly spelled company name will still come up, and you will have caught a potentially grave and embarrassing error.
-Danny Bracco
Director of Communications