Most of what we publish and share with the world is edited, but not all of it is, and to get your message across in a deliberate and concise way that helps your readers, you should review your work.
Done doesn’t mean deployed when it comes to your first draft.
The first draft is typically where you’ll explore your ideas and make your points. The second and third drafts are where you refine your points and craft a message that people will find helpful and enjoy reading. Give yourself some time between drafts so that content feels fresh when you return to it and you can review it with new eyes.
Delete anything that doesn’t add to your point.
When we write, our first drafts often include extraneous details that help us write the first draft but aren’t useful to the reader. When you review your work, ask yourself if everything you’ve included will be interesting or useful to the reader. Chances are, they’re interested in the topic you’ve written about, but not necessarily the personal circumstances that led to your insights about the topic.
Turn on your spell checker.
Typos happen to the best of us, but there’s a direct correlation between the number of silly mistakes in a post and the restraint the editor will exercise when going through the rest of your work. If typos slip through into the final copy, they do impact the reader’s confidence in the content and the people who published it. So it’s important to make sure we keep typos to a minimum.
We have a corporate Grammarly account (details are with the software policies). Grammarly isn’t always right, but its suggestions are right more than they’re wrong, so it is a good idea to run your post through Grammarly.
White space is your friend.
Dense paragraph after dense paragraph of text is intimidating and will put readers off. Try to break up big paragraphs by grouping similar thoughts into smaller paragraphs. If you’re listing options or documenting steps, use bullet points or numbered lists instead.
More white space makes text more approachable.
Replace ambiguity with specificity.
As an expert on your topic, it can be easy to forget what you didn’t know before you became an expert, which can lead to making assumptions about what your audience knows. Don’t feel like you have to explain every possible aspect of your topic or provide in-depth background knowledge for every post, but do try to be specific in your writing to make it easy for non-experts to follow along.
When you review your post, look for words like it, they, them, and those, and if there’s a chance the reader might be confused by which it, they, them, or those you’re referring to, be more specific so there’s no doubt.
Use text-to-speech.
Use text-to-speech software to listen to your writing. When we read our own text, we tend to read what we think we wrote as opposed to what we actually wrote (this is why typos are so persistent). Having the computer read the text makes typos and other mistakes we’d otherwise miss stand out.
Review the edits.
Your blog posts will be edited before they go live. We’re aiming for a consistent voice and tone with all the blog posts, so some of the edits will likely be for consistency with other posts.
Review the changes that are made, and if you notice any recurring patterns to the edits, take note as this will help you avoid similar edits in the future. If you’re uncertain about why some edits have been made, or you disagree with the edits, ping the person who made the edits to discuss the changes. The editing process is designed to make the posts read as well as they can, but we don’t want that to alter your meaning or make you feel like you’re being made to say something you didn’t mean.