Improving Your Self-Editing Skills – 5 Smart Tips

If you are good at writing, then editing your own work is not a big deal. No matter if you are a student, professional or a working mom, you should polish your self-editing skills to make your work more proficient. When it comes to writing, proofreading and editing academic essays, business letters, resumes and other documents, read the following tips carefully. 

 

-     If your colleague, friend, family member requests you to look at the paper, take it on. As the more editing and proofreading you do, the better you get at it. It helps you a lot to edit your own work perfectly. 

 

-     It sounds great if you craft sentence by sentence, making corrections in paragraphs one by one. But if you spend number of hours on word choice or sentence structure, and unable to move forward with the assignment, it is the right time to turn off your inner editor, ignore grammar and typing mistakes and just write in your own. 

 

-     If you edit on-screen, you can easily adjust to the latest format and find it much easier than doing it on a printed page. If you are going to make big revisions in the writing assignment, and are worried about missing the original text, it is advisable to use track changes of Microsoft Word that tracks all the changes you make during the editing process. Go through the draft and review every edit to accept or reject the changes later. 

 

-     Every time you edit the paper, you learn something new and polish your own writing skills. The more projects you do, the less you will need to look them up in the future. In the end, it becomes natural and part of your own writing process. 

 

-     When you are editing your own or someone else’s work, you need to be very careful. If you are not sure about grammar, punctuation, spelling or context, you need to be able to follow a grammar and style guide, to ensure you have the right sources. Be meticulous and use good judgment, while keeping in mind that sometimes it is always better to bend the rules. 

 

Following these simple tips will help you hone your self-editing skills while making your writing projects a big success.