Editing your own work is hard, perhaps the hardest thing about being a solo blogger writing for yourself. All at the same time you are publisher, editor, writer, and publicist, and the editor in you has to emerge quickly enough to make your work stand out from the vast seas of semi-literate Internet comments that litter the landscape.
If you've been working at something for a while, you won't see the problems in your own writing. Awkward phrasing, inappropriate wording, and missing commas signal that something wasn't copy edited by a competent editor. Paragraphs that don't fit well together suggest that no one has read the whole thing through with a critical eye. It's hard enough to establish your own confident voice without also having a nagging self-critical editor wondering about every phrase.
It's helpful to queue up postings for later publication, and to edit them as you have time to make the writing better. On Friday, write something for Tuesday, and edit the piece that you wrote for Monday. You'll get a little bit of distance between you and the work, and that distance can help quite a bit. If you are far enough ahead on your writing schedule to have a buffer of a few days built up, you will have the opportunity to go back and re-edit the same piece a few times and polish it up in ways that are otherwise hard to maintain on a twice daily deadline.
Even putting the post (or other writing) away for an hour or two and returning to edit it can be beneficial.
It's the "fresh eye" view that's needed for editing. I sometimes get that by going for a walk or by cleaning up the kitchen or reading the New York Times for a half hour. Or I switch from writing one piece to researching another, and then circle back to edit the first.
Posted by: Vickie Elmer | 07/31/2012 at 01:47 PM