Three tips for being your own editor
Long ago, before the internet was born, you had writers and you had editors. They worked in the same field but they were not the same. The writers wrote and the editors edote. I mean, edited. Sure, writers could edit and editors could write but no one expected it. The way no one would expect a maths teacher to teach PE but sometimes they take PE supervisions and wheel in the video player and you watch Dodgeball and that's kind of like PE, right?
But not anymore, bucko. Now you have to teach maths and PE and sell your knick-knacks at the flea market to get by. And you have to write and edit and think about communication strategies just to send a dang email. Writers today have to be able to edit because there's no red-pen-wielding editor coming to save us.
This is bad news because self-editing is so hard to do well. When you read back something you recently wrote, your brain helpfully smooths over your mistakes, dropped words, weird phrases, and fills over them in for you. It focuses on the message or big picture. Daniel Kahneman, of Thinking Fast and Slow fame, describes this as generalization. It's something the automatic part of your brain does to help you parse information quickly. Your brain loves efficiency so it's hard to tell it “No, please brain no efficiency today, we want accuracy”.
Thankfully, though, there are ways to make editing yourself easier. Here are three tips for being your own editor.
Write first, edit second
Writing and editing are different processes so it can help significantly to first put on your writing hat (velvet, plumed, scented, extravagant) and then put on your editing hat (severe, practical, no-nonsense, sun-smart). Start by writing exactly what you mean. Then go back and edit.
Grammarly
Hate to say it because Grammarly drives me up the wall sometimes. I get so mad when I'm writing in a tiny text box and the Grammarly widget is hovering in the corner not letting me click on the text and also telling me it's wrong. I. Know. It's. Wrong. I. Am. Trying. To. Fix. It. Move aside, widget!
I have long, angry conversations with Grammarly when I'm working alone about why my word choice is not wrong, YOU are wrong, Grammarly. But goddamn, it does help polish my writing.
Don't pay for the Premium version, it's somehow even more annoying than the free version. But do get the plugin so it can edit your writing on-page. For longer documents or emails, open a new document through the plugin and edit it there.
Text-to-speech
This is actually the golden tip. Without this tip, I would be unemployable. Everything I write, this paragraph included, goes through speech-to-text.
On a Mac, highlight a paragraph and right-click. In the dropdown menu, you'll find "Speech" > "Start speaking" and listen in.
On a computer that's not a Mac, this works just as well: https://speechnotes.co/
Hearing your words spoken back is a way to override your automatic brain and hear what you've really written. It works almost as well to change your document text into something that's difficult to read, possibly with long, swoopy flourishes, and edit it once more.
And if you want to, follow this guide to choose a new voice for the speaker. I chose Moira, an Irish woman who sometimes, in the right conditions, cannot pronounce "quickly". She says '"Qu-ike-ly". I love her.
Between hats, horrible Grammarly, and lovely Moira, you can self-edit your everyday work to a reasonable degree and feel pretty much fine when you hit send/publish/release the messenger pigeon.
TL;DR? Edit your own work to pretty-much-fine standard by writing first and editing second, downloading Grammarly, and running everything through speech-to-text.