Editing your own work helps you hone your writing skills and learn about your own unique style and habits.  Having a critical eye for your own writing means you will recognize both your strengths and your weaknesses and can tailor your efforts to focus on the areas that need the most improvement. Before you hire editing services such as FirstEditing, try self-editing your manuscript ­– not just to improve the manuscript but also as a writing exercise.

Start by running a standard computer spell-check to catch the most obvious mistakes. Although a spell-check won’t notice errors where the word has been spelled correctly but used wrongly, it will catch certain types of mistakes ­– and this might even reveal habits you didn’t even know you had. Perhaps you never realised you were spelling that word wrong all along, or that you had been putting the punctuation in backwards all these years? Self-editing helps you become aware of your own writing traits.

Try to make a habit of checking grammar websites to help you learn the most commonly made grammar mistakes, and check writing websites to raise your awareness of plot or character clichés. Your professional editor will be the best person to find such offenders in a later draft, but it never hurts to examine your own work early-on as a method of self-improvement.

There are some great resources online for learning about grammar and writing. These include the Chicago Manual of Style website (chicagomanualofstyle), which includes an often-witty Q&A section that covers a great range of writing issues;  the MLA (mla) website, or Owl Purdue writing labs (owl.english.purdue.edu).

Finally, as you read your work, pretend you are reading the words for the first time and pay attention to any repeated words or phrases. Many new authors have certain phrases or word patterns they don’t notice they repeat, but agents or other readers unaccustomed to their speech patterns will spot them right away.

Finally, once you are happy with your draft, send your book to FirstEditing.com to have a professional editor review it. For only pennies per word, this final edit will catch all the less-obvious mistakes, hidden typos, or patches of writing that might be open to reader misinterpretation or cause confusion. Always hire a professional editing service to check your work before publishing to ensure your final piece is as crystal clear as possible.

Related posts:

1. How To Improve Your Writing: em dashes and ellipses
2. How to Improve Your Writing: Capitalization
3. 7 Ways to Check Your Commas When Self-Editing
4. Successful Blogging: Creating Your Own Virtual Writing Space
5. How to Send Your Press Release

Tags: editing, editors, firstediting, Professional Editing

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 17th, 2010 at 10:08 am and is filed under Book Editing, Book Editors, Business Editing, Copy Editing, Fiction Editing, Novel Editing, Technical Editing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.