February 01, 2023
It isn't easy to edit your own writing. Because you know what you meant to write, your eye will often gloss over misspellings, missing words, and incorrect word choices. Even when you are determined to slow down and read what you’ve written word-for-word, it’s almost impossible to resist skimming some sections. Sometimes you may find yourself skimming inadvertently, and other times it may be by choice when you think you’ve reviewed a passage enough. By choice or by accident, it’s hard to look at something you’ve written with the level of attention required to do a comprehensive edit. For this reason, if at all possible, it’s always best practice to have someone else review what you’ve written to ensure it is clear and has no glaring errors.
However, there are occasions when editing your own writing is unavoidable. For instance, in the context of grant writing, you might work for a small nonprofit and be unable to afford the services of a professional editor. Or maybe you are uncomfortable asking a friend or colleague to read your text. It’s for these moments that we’ve created the following list of tips and tricks.
The list includes some software tools you can use, but most of the tips are free to implement and only require your time.
Eight Tips for Editing Your Writing
1. Take a break. The first tip is to step away from whatever you are working on so you can return to it with fresh eyes. The longer you can step away from the document, the better; even if you have an immediate deadline, a few hours away can help. If you are so time-crunched that you cannot step away from your document for even a few hours, the next best thing to do is to review the document in reverse order, starting with whatever section you finished first and working up to the most recent section you worked on. Even though it may not have been that long since you stopped working on the first section, any gap between the time you last worked on it and the time you conduct your final review is better than nothing and can help you spot errors and awkward phrasing.
2. Print it. The second tip is to conduct your review on a physical copy of the document. While not strictly necessary, it can help to place a ruler underneath each line as you review it. Some people swear that the only way to edit a document effectively is to print a copy and mark it up by hand. We don’t think this is necessarily true, but some people may find that working from a printed copy helps them slow down and do a closer read than they can when looking at it on a computer screen. Because printing your document has both cost and environmental implications, you may want to reserve this option for shorter documents.
3. Read your text out loud. Another way to catch errors and improve flow is to read your document out loud. It is also one of the best ways to help make your writing match your “voice” and sound more natural. If you are working on a longer document, reading the whole thing aloud may not be feasible. However, you can still use this method to improve your writing by using it on a handful of paragraphs or pages that are giving you the most difficulty.
4. Read each line in reverse. All of these strategies have one thing in common, which is that they help you look at your writing in a new light. This next strategy does this by changing how you read: Instead of reading your sentences from beginning to end, you’re going to read them in reverse, from the end to the beginning. Each method we’re outlining works better for some things than others. This method is particularly good for copy editing tasks, such as spotting typos like extra letters or accidentally typing the same word twice in a row. For obvious reasons, it is not the best method to identify problems with flow or readability.
5. Change the spacing. On this theme of changing things up, another way to bring a fresh perspective to your writing is to change the spacing. If whatever you are working on must be submitted as single-spaced text, switching to double-spaced text will give you a new view. Another trick, arguably even more effective, is to switch from a single-column to a two-column format. After you reformat the text into columns, you will invariably discover sentences or paragraphs that suddenly seem far too long, clunky, or tangled. Changing the column width alters the text's experience to such a degree that we strongly suggest formatting your text as columns early in the writing process if the final product will be published in two or more columns.
6. Change the context. If you’ve been working on a document for a very long time, as often happens with grant proposals, you can become so accustomed to seeing different elements like a data table that it’s easy to jump over the table without reviewing its details. Didn’t the data get checked by someone else two weeks ago? Yes, exactly, and that’s the problem! Especially toward the end of working on any document, you want to believe that certain things are done and do not have to be revisited. However, as a document undergoes multiple revisions, the tables and graphics may not be updated to reflect these changes, or they may be placeholders that someone forgot to replace with the final versions. To evaluate tables and other inserts, it can help to copy and paste them onto a blank page. For the review, place the new document next to the main document. This makes it easier to compare the figure or table against the rest of the content to ensure everything is correct, consistent, and complete.
7. Search. Most of us have a few words that trip us up. We might misspell commonly used words (its vs. it’s) or use a homonym instead of the word we intended (e.g., hear vs. here). Additionally, there may be terms of art in the document that we are not overly familiar with and need to review carefully to ensure we have used them correctly. For these types of issues, we find it helpful to keep a running list of potential problem areas as we work on the document. During the editing stage, we will return to this list and search the document for each term, phrase, number, heading, or other issue of concern to ensure that every time it is mentioned, it is correctly and consistently spelled, numbered, and worded. If the document includes a list of abbreviations, we review it to confirm that each abbreviation is defined on first use and used consistently throughout.
8. Use a spell-check and grammar tool. A final suggestion is to use an advanced spell-checker such as Grammarly. Microsoft’s built-in grammar and spellchecker tool has become increasingly robust and is a good option, particularly because it is easy to implement in Microsoft Word. Sometimes, Microsoft Word’s grammar and spell-checker tool is all we use because third-party tools (like Grammarly, PerfectIt, and Lingofy) have limits on how many pages can be reviewed at a time. However, if the document’s length doesn’t rule them out, we will usually scan it with Microsoft Word’s built-in grammar and spell checker and another editing tool. We’ve found Grammarly to be the best of those we’ve tried, so that’s usually the one we use. We rely on Grammarly less as a spellchecker and more to identify sentences that can be written more concisely. One of the challenges of editing your own writing is that, particularly if a sentence is communicating what you want it to, you may not think about ways to say the same thing in fewer words. Grammarly can help flag these areas. While Grammarly is very good, you cannot simply scan your writing with Grammarly and accept every suggested change. It is imperative to review Grammarly’s proposed changes one by one to determine whether they are relevant and correct for the given context.
The idea behind all these tips is to create a little space between you and your writing, allowing you to look at it more objectively. You may not end up using most of the strategies regularly. However, if your writing will be closely evaluated, as in a grant proposal, employing one or more of these suggestions can help ensure that the final draft makes sense, flows well, and is as free of misspellings and typos as possible.