Charlotte Pemberton
Why Editing Your Own Work Is So Tricky
You know your own writing too well. When you reread a draft minutes after finishing it, your brain quietly fills in the gaps, corrects the typos and smooths over the clunky sentence you left half-finished. That is not laziness — it is how reading works. You are seeing what you meant to write, not what is actually on the page.
The fix is not to try harder. It is to work in passes, and to give each pass a single job. Trying to check spelling, structure and tone all at once means you will do all three badly. Below is a checklist you can work through in order, ideally with a gap of at least a few hours between finishing the draft and starting the edit.
Pass One: The Structural Read
Before you touch a single sentence, read the whole piece quickly for shape. Do not correct anything yet. Just ask whether the thing works as a whole.
- Does the opening earn the next paragraph? If your first two sentences are throat-clearing, cut them and start where the real piece begins.
- Does each section do one job? If a section drifts between two ideas, split it or cut the weaker one.
- Is anything in the wrong order? Readers absorb information best when each point sets up the next. If you have to explain something early that pays off later, move it.
- Does the ending land, or just stop? A good ending echoes the opening, answers the question you raised, or gives the reader one clear thing to do next.
If the structure is wrong, no amount of sentence-level polish will save it. Fix the bones first.
Pass Two: Clarity and Cutting
Now go paragraph by paragraph. Your enemy here is not bad grammar — it is fog. Most flabby writing is not stupid, it is just padded, usually because the writer was not quite sure what they meant.
- Hunt for throat-clearing phrases. "It is important to note that", "In order to", "At the end of the day" — nearly all of these can go.
- Turn nominalisations back into verbs. "We made a decision" becomes "we decided". "The implementation of the plan" becomes "implementing the plan".
- One idea per sentence. If a sentence has three commas and two "and"s, break it up.
- Kill the adverbs, keep the verbs. "Walked quickly" is weaker than "hurried". "Said angrily" is weaker than "snapped".
- Check your pronouns. If "it", "this" or "they" could refer to more than one thing in the previous sentence, name the thing.
A useful trick: read each paragraph and try to summarise it in one line. If you cannot, the paragraph probably contains two ideas mashed together.
Pass Three: Grammar, Spelling and Punctuation
This is the pass most people jump to first, and it is the least important — but it still matters, especially if you are sending work to an editor who will judge you on it.
- Read it aloud, or use your device's read-aloud function. Your ear catches dropped words and repeated phrases far better than your eye.
- Check apostrophes deliberately. "Its" versus "it's", "your" versus "you're", plural decades without apostrophes ("the 1990s").
- Watch for homophones. Their/there/they're, affect/effect, principle/principal, complement/compliment.
- Check your commas around clauses. If you have an introductory phrase, it needs a comma after it. If you have a list, be consistent.
- Read the piece backwards, sentence by sentence. This breaks the flow your brain has memorised and forces you to see each sentence fresh.
Pass Four: Consistency and House Details
Editors notice inconsistency faster than almost anything else. It signals that you did not read your own work carefully, which makes them worry about what else you missed.
- Pick a spelling system and stick to it. If you are writing for a UK publication, that means British spelling throughout — organise, colour, centre, travelled.
- Check your numbers. Spell out one to nine and use numerals from 10 upwards, or whatever your publication's style guide says. Be consistent.
- Check names, dates and titles. Read them a second time. Misspelled names are the fastest way to lose a reader's trust.
- Check formatting. Consistent heading levels, consistent capitalisation in headings, consistent use of bold or italics.
- Check your word count. If the brief said 900 words and you have sent 1,200, you have made an editor's job harder.
A Final Read Before You Send
Before you hit send, do one last thing: read the piece as though you are the editor receiving it cold. You have never met the writer. Would you want to work with them again?
Ask whether the piece delivers what the title promises, whether the first paragraph makes you want to keep reading, and whether anything in it would embarrass you if it appeared on a national site. If the answer to any of those is no, you have one more pass to do.
Finally, sleep on it if you can. A draft that looked finished at midnight often reveals three obvious errors at nine the next morning. That gap between writing and sending is the most underrated editing tool you have — and it costs nothing.
