Upon completing the full draft of your manuscript, you face the issue of editing your work. Editing is a crucial stage to consider in your publishing aspirations. Before hiring a professional editor, self-editing your work can offer a range of benefits. Perhaps you have heard of self-editing before, but you are unsure of what it entails. In essence, self-editing means critically reviewing your own writing for errors and stylistic improvements. Such revisions have a supplementary purpose, but they do not replace professional editing. Even editors use professional editors when they write a book. After all, four eyes see more than two, and it is incredibly difficult to review your own work objectively.
Nonetheless, I would recommend you try your hand at self-editing as it can increase your critical awareness of your writing. Learning how to resolve problematic issues may also improve your overall writing abilities. If you revise your manuscript before working with an editor, the editor can do more in-depth work. So, if you’d like to find out how to self-edit your manuscript, keep reading the tips below.
Understand the purpose and scope
Before getting started, you need to do some important groundwork. Ensure that you understand the different types of editing and their purpose. This post focuses on copy editing, hence improvements in grammar, style, and punctuation. In the same step, be aware of the norms and requirements for the type of manuscript you are working on. The desired style and tone of an academic document will differ significantly from that of a novel, for instance. Researching these formal aspects will allow you to focus your efforts more effectively. You can even make an overview for yourself to keep on hand while self-editing your work.
Find the right time and (mental) space
You will likely rewrite your manuscript several times before it is complete. Editing formalities and style before completing the manuscript can create unnecessary work. You will also go through your manuscript several times while self-editing. Try to anticipate the date of completion and factor in a few weeks as a buffer. During this time you will NOT look at the manuscript at all. If you delve right into editing, you will likely not see the forest for the trees. Try to find a sweet spot between stepping away and losing momentum. This temporal and mental distance will allow you to be more critical of your own work.
Identify the issues with your writing
This can be a tricky but transformative step. Review your manuscript sentence by sentence to find elements that conflict with the stylistic norms of your genre. You do have to be rigorous in this step. If you are unsure of what to look for, the following points might help you:
- run-on sentences
- repetitive sentence structures and very long sentences
- overused (and often vague) adjectives and verbs
- excessive use of passive voice
- empty filler words that contribute no meaning, such as ‘kind of’, ‘sort of’, ‘also’, ‘literally’, ‘totally’, etc.
- punctuation and spelling errors and inconsistencies
Make a detailed list of all issues you want to rework in your manuscript in the next round. You can highlight specific aspects in the same colour to map out areas for reworking. You do not have to remove all repetitions, but you should aim for balance and variety. Focus your list on the main issues you can improve with confidence. If you include too many elements you do not know how to improve, you might get overwhelmed and miss many issues. You can leave those to the professional editor for later.
Use available resources
When you start reworking your document, use available resources for help. Besides the ‘editor’ function in Word, a dictionary of your regional variety of English can help with spelling. If you struggle to find synonyms, use a Thesaurus. Different writing apps can help you identify problematic sentence structures. You could try the Hemingway Editor app, for instance. The ‘track changes’ and ‘comments’ functions in Word allow you to trace your progress and leave notes for further revisions. These are only a few examples of resources you can use for support, and there are many more.
Change things up for proofreading
You may not be able to resolve every issue in one round of self-editing your work. Instead, the self-editing process may require several rounds of working through your manuscript. Once you have resolved all structural and stylistic issues, you can do a final round of proofreading. In this round, you will try to spot remaining spelling and punctuation errors. You may find it difficult to read carefully and not just glance over the manuscript. This is often the case if you have already worked through the document several times.
Changing things up may help you focus. After editing on a tablet or laptop, it can be helpful to print the document and proofread it with pen and paper. You can review the chapters in a different order. You could also read the manuscript backward sentence by sentence to spot errors. Reading the text out loud to yourself may feel silly, but it gives you a good sense of how it sounds. As with all previous steps, it is important to take your time on this last part and to avoid rushing things.
Get started
As you can see, self-editing involves a lot of thorough planning, attention to detail and work. However, if you put in the necessary effort and time, you can improve your document and acquire beneficial skills.