Self-Editing for the Nonprofessional Writer

Recently, in a post about editing professional writing, I broke down the revision process into 3 general stages, which I'll repeat below. In that post, I gave my best tips for people who are editing someone else's writing: find out where in the process the author is, and give feedback that's appropriate for that stage. Here, I want to give a few tips for people who are editing their own writing, again broken down by revision stages. Not all of these methods will fit everybody's style, but these are some of the ones I like.

One general piece of advice before starting: print it out. Forgive me, trees, but a change of context is crucial to getting a new perspective on something you've been laboring over on a screen.

Editing: Make a reverse outline
(At this stage you've got a draft or part of a draft. There's still big-picture work to be done: ideas, structure, and audience focus can all be refined further.)
For looking more closely at a piece's structure, one good strategy is creating a reverse outline. Standard outlining is probably familiar from school assignments: you plan out your structure with copious roman numerals, and you stick to those numerals loyally. Reverse outlining is less a planning strategy than a way of stopping to see what you've already got. Here's what you do:

• Go through your draft. Next to each paragraph, write a phrase or brief sentence saying what the main point(s) of that paragraph is.

• When you've done that for every paragraph, take all of your phrases and put them in order, like a list.

• Look over your reverse outline, keeping an eye out for these things:
  -Were you able to find a main point for each paragraph? There aren't any hard and fast rules about how long paragraphs should be (in news writing, for example, it's perfectly valid for them to be just one sentence) or what internal structure they should follow (there are paragraphs that start off with a main point at the beginning, and paragraphs that build toward a main point at their end, and combinations in between). But in whatever size or format, a paragraph should be a coherent unit of thought. If you had trouble summarizing, there may be some drift going on.
  -What kind of order do the points follow? What is the connection between one point and the next? Is there a general trend to the list? Do equally important ideas get a similar amount of attention? Are there chunks that seem out of place once you've got them boiled down?

Copyediting: Read aloud
(At this stage you've worked through the big picture stuff. You have a good sense of what you're saying; now you can work more on how to say it.)
This one is simple. It's best if you can work with a partner--give them one copy of your draft, and keep another for yourself. Have your partner read aloud, listening carefully for places where they hesitate or stumble. Sometimes when reading through your own writing, your mind will smooth over an awkward patch because it knows what to expect. Hearing someone else try to parse your sentences can give a different sense of which ones work and which ones need work. If you don't have someone to read to you, then reading aloud yourself can still be helpful--again, a change in perspective is crucial to helping you catch things that could be overlooked.

Proofreading
(By this point, you're done making changes to your structure and, for the most part, your wording. Now it's time to clean it up: get rid of typos and grammar/punctuation errors.)
For me, proofreading is the stage where it's easiest to overlook something. By the time I'm wrapping things up, I'll have considered my phrasing several times, but I might be so used to a sentence that I don't see the extra "the" or missing "a" in there. At this point, the big picture that's been the focus so far becomes a distraction--it needs to be backgrounded so the details can stand out. One way to do this is to start at the end; read your draft backward, one sentence at a time, all the way through. Getting rid of the context helps break up the flow that makes it easy to skip over a typo. Choosing any reading path other than the natural start-to-finish one should help with this.

General tips and tools

• Print it out. It's worth repeating, because it's surprising how much that simple change can make an error jump off the page.

• Look at it in context. A lot of times, the spaces we write in (a word processor, the back end of a CMS, a blogging tool) are not the same as the ones people will be reading in (a PDF, the front end of the site, a projection where every letter is blown up to several times its usual size). Seeing what you've written in its new form is the only sure way to work on things like formatting--it's also one more chance to proofread, aided by another change in perspective. It might sound obvious, but don't forget to look at your writing in the context where it will actually appear.

• Spell check is generally not a great tool--it's a blunt instrument that highlights problems that aren't really problems while missing contextual errors. In response to my last post on editing, Nolan, our lead software engineer, pointed me to a tool that he uses for his own writing: http://www.polishmywriting.com/. Unlike a normal spellcheck, this tool is contextually smart--so it can tell if you've used 'hear' when you meant 'here'--and it also provides style suggestions to simplify overly complex phrasing. As with any tool, you should think critically about its suggestions rather than taking them at face value; for instance, it will highlight anything that's in passive voice, which isn't actually always wrong. But even if you don't use every suggestion, this seems like a good tool to point out places where you might want to stop and think about why you've chosen the words you're using.