I have strengths and weaknesses as a writer.
I won’t write about my strengths; it comes across as arrogant and self-serving. However, I will occasionally share my weaknesses, especially as a try to tackle them.
And my weakness which is most easily? corrected?
Sloppy writing.
By sloppy I mean simple grammatical errors, spelling issues, and punctuation mistakes—technical fixes which can easily be identified and fixed in my editing process.
Now, for my blog posts, my editing process sounds OK.
I write out my rough draft on Ulysses, usually letting the content percolate for a day or two, then have a second re-write. Next, I copy my post to the application Grammarly, which I use to correct spelling and grammar errors. Finally, I copy the content to my WordPress Drafts page, with a final edit and read-through, before scheduling.
But even with three edits, I still can put out sloppy work!
I will read through a just published post and cringe when I capture an typo, requiring me to go back and edit a fourth time. I especially hate this, because I realize that my sloppiness may well have derailed whatever potentially good idea my blog post was trying to convey. A sloppy mistake devalues the entire message.
So what am I doing wrong?
I stopped printing out my posts to edit and proof with pen and paper.
I learned the importance of this step over a decade ago at a WordPress conference, where the keynote speaker was none other than Tim Farris. (To see this vintage Tim Farris talk, click here to see it on WordPress TV.) In that talk, he says he always edits his final draft on a printed copy, and he invariably finds at least one mistake. (Interestingly, whenever I have printed out my final draft and read it out loud, I too have always found at least one mistake, and on this post I found over five.)
Why I stopped doing this I am unsure. Laziness perhaps, or too dependent on my writing apps? Regardless, from this point on, every blog post before publication will have a final edit with pen and paper.
It won’t solve every editing mistake, but I suspect it will help quite a lot.