How to Edit Your Own Work

“I hate to write, but I love having written.” Dorothy Parker

Writing is hard work, even for seasoned professionals. From the blank page at the beginning, to the clumsy and uneven middle, and all the way through to the sloppy end, first drafts never seem to get easier.

Don’t despair, though. First drafts aren’t supposed to be easy. As Harry Shaw wrote in Errors in English and Ways to Correct Them, “There is no such thing as good writing. There is only good rewriting.”

Editors can help, but you don’t want to turn that mess of a draft in to an editor. And what if you don’t have an editor?

It’s all on you.

Here are five tips to make the process much easier.

1. Take a break

Before rewriting even a sentence, you must clear your head and get some space between you and your words. Take a walk. Read a magazine. Cook a meal. Let your mind rest so you can look at what you have so far with fresh eyes.

2. Watch your eyes

As you cycle through second and third drafts, watch your eyes. If you keep looking at the same sentences over and over and you aren’t sure why, something is probably wrong with them. You might not know what the problem is, but your subconscious mind knows something is off. Keep working those sentences until they no longer stand out.

3. Read your work out loud

Awkwardly written sentences sound twice as awkward when you read them out loud as they appear when you look at them silently. If your words are clunky, you’ll hear the clunk. Keep banging away until the words flow from you mouth when you read them aloud as easily as they do when you’re talking.

4. Print it

Print a hard copy and mark it up with a red pen. Seeing your work in a different format initiates a slightly different thought process. Part of your brain thinks it’s reading your words for the first time, giving you a glimpse of how your work looks to readers.

Problems such as typos, clumsy wording, and botched information flow that were previously invisible are suddenly obvious.

Don’t be afraid to make your page bleed with red ink. Remember: all that red is making it better. Go over your work again and again, marking, slashing, crossing out and revising. You’ll know you’re done when you read through an entire draft and hardly make any changes.

5. Sleep on it

Your subconscious mind never stops chewing on problems, so until you file or publish your work, your brain is still in writing mode even when it’s asleep. You’ll rarely wake up with an epiphany, but better phrasing, a better organization, or a better beginning or ending will be worked out somewhere in your head, and it will reveal itself to you on your final pass through.