Proven Tips to Self Edit Yourself

One cool thing about blogging: No pesky editor to change what you say and slow you down. The downside of blogging: No one to edit out your mistakes, but you.

So to blog well you need to become your own editor. It isn’t easy because most of us tend to think the way we say something is best and our words are immortal.

Yet it’s important to edit yourself.

Sure, blogs should be conversational, and a typo in a blog post on occasion won’t ruin your reputation.  But your credibility will sink if you consistently misuse words or allow mistakes into your writing. Or readers may get distracted by errors rather than focus on what you’re saying.

I’ve found a sure-fire way to get a comment on my Family Life blog is to make a typo. Some kind soul is sure to point it out quickly. While most bloggers want comments, I doubt many want ones calling you a nitwit or worse for making a silly mistake.

That means you need to learn to read your own writing with a critical eye and check for the common errors that many writers make.

How do you think like an editor? Gerry McGovern Publications’ guide to writing for the Web offers a concise list of what you should ask yourself about each sentence you write:

• Is it clear?
• Is there a simpler way to say this?
• Is there a shorter way to say this?
• Is this necessary?

Now once you have that mindset, you should keep track of common mistakes that you make. We all have them: Words we misspell over and over; grammatical errors we just can’t seem to master. When you know your weak points, you can keep an eye out for them.

To get you started, here are some common errors I’ve come across in 11 years editing for a daily newspaper:

• Know the difference between tricky words: I’m talking about words such as your and you’re. Copyblogger has two posts on this topic that are worth checking out here and
  here. (By the way, your is a possessive pronoun as in your family or your mistake; you’re is a contraction of you and are. To make sure I’m using you’re correctly, I always read it aloud to myself as you are to check if it makes sense.)
• Understand subject-verb agreement: Basically this means if you have a singular noun, you use a singular verb, and you use a plural verb with a plural noun. For example, the sentence “He walks home” uses a singular noun (he) and verb (walks..) Things get more complicated with words such as each and everyone, which take a singular verb regardless of what comes after them. (”Each of the girls sings well“ is correct though girls is plural because the verb agrees with the subject, each.)
  Grammarbook.com offers a more involved discussion of subject-verb agreement.
• Use apostrophes well: Apostrophes are in contractions (don’t or isn’t) or to show possession as in the girl’s book. For a plural word, the apostrophe goes after the s as in the girls’ books. (Some sticklers add an additional s to make it the girls’s books, although I find that confusing and really too formal for blogging.) And for use in years: “The Great Depression was in the 1930s” and “The Great Depression was in the ‘30s” are correct. “The Great Depression was in the 1930’s” or “The Great Depression was in the 30’s“ are not.
  Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab has some additional advice.
• Spell check every post: Spell check won’t pick up everything. It can’t tell if you’re using its when you should write it’s. But it can keep you from embarrassing yourself too much.

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