Engaging Content Writing
By: Kaspar Noé Van Dijk
Tags: Digital Marketing, Blockchain, Marketing, Content Marketing, Copywriting

1: Big Picture Revision

At this stage of the editing process, you want to look at your piece as a whole and consider whether you need to make any fairly big changes (like cutting a whole section or adding in some new material).

It’s often very helpful to have a gap between the drafting of your content and this phase of editing, so that you can come back to it with fresh eyes. If you can let it ‘rest’ for a day or so, do that.

Once you’ve let it be for a bit, read through the whole post (or piece of content) and look out for:

• Any tangents or digressions that aren’t really relevant — could they become part of another piece instead?

• Anything that the reader may not understand — you might want to include a short explanation, and/or a link to a piece of content that covers this in more detail.

• Any paragraphs that don’t seem to be in the right order or don’t flow well. Even if you planned your post carefully before starting, you still may find that there’s a better way to present information. Often it helps to give readers the ‘why’ before the ‘how’ of something, for instance.

Some people find it helps to print out their draft post at this stage, or to preview it on their blog (without publishing it) so they can see how it’ll look to the reader.

2: Detailed Editing

Once you’re happy that the major building blocks of your post are all in place, it’s time to move on and take a detailed look at each sentence. (It’s important to do this after the big picture revision so that you don’t end up spending a long time on sentences that you later cut out altogether.)

At this stage, you’re looking out for things like:

• Overly long or complicated sentences — try breaking them up into two or even three shorter sentences

• Unclear phrasing — reword where necessary to clarify things

• Jargon or technical terms — sometimes these are necessary and appropriate, but often you can get rid of them. If you do need them, it’s helpful to briefly explain their meanings.

• Repeated phrases or words — while repeating things for effect is fine, unintentional repetition can sound odd. If you’ve used the same word a lot, try varying it. (This doesn’t apply to very common words, like ‘the’ or ‘and’.) Use a thesaurus to find an alternative word if you can’t think of one.

• Clichés and well-worn phrases — it’s easy to include too many of these when you’re drafting your piece, but they’re often best avoided, especially if they’re making your writing quite wordy. Using a lot of phrases like “at the end of the day” or “only time will tell” can make your writing seem a bit bland or boring. You may not need them at all, or you may be able to find a better way to express your thoughts.

From an SEO perspective, this is also a good point to check that you’ve used your primary keyword (and any secondary keywords) in an appropriate way throughout your content, if you’re working on a post or page for your website.

Remember, you definitely don’t need to go overboard here: there’s no minimum ‘keyword density’ you should be aiming to reach.

3: Proofreading

Proofreading is the final stage of editing. At this point, you’re not looking to make changes or improvements to your text — you’re just looking out for any mistakes that need correcting.

These might be simple typos (where your fingers hit the wrong keys) or words that you’ve misspelled because you’ve confused them (e.g. ‘their’, ‘they’re’, and ‘there’ are easily muddled, as are ‘affect’ and ‘effect’).

Spellcheckers will pick up many of these mistakes, but not all. If you know that spelling isn’t your strong point, you might want to use an app like Grammarly to try to catch more errors. (Don’t take every single suggestion at face value, though, it doesn’t always get it right; you should make sure the suggested change still makes sense to you.)

No tool can be a substitute for a human editor, though, and it’s still important that you read through your work carefully. If you struggle to spot your own errors (and most writers do), then try printing out your post so you can go through it line by line, or read it aloud. Alternatively, have a colleague or friend read it through with fresh eyes.