Editing blog posts takes time and effort. I have been crafting and refining texts for over seven years. During that time, I have made plenty of mistakes. But it’s not the mistakes we make in life that truly matter, but the lessons we learn from them. So, to help me spot errors, I have had to learn editing tips and tricks.
My goal is to help you avoid making the same mistakes that I have made. To do this, I have created a step-by-step guide to editing blog posts. Some steps in this post will contain familiar ideas, and some you’ve probably never heard of. I will also discuss software and applications to help you with your editing process.
If you use the steps in this post, you’ll edit your content to perfection.
So, let’s begin…
Step 1: Use Hemingway
Hemingway is a fantastic application. This desktop software can tell you if your blog post has passive voice sentences or has too many adverbs. Not only that, it can also show you the overall readability of your content and where to find hard-to-read paragraphs.
Step 2: Use a Checklist
After putting my content into Hemingway, I then use my trusted checklist. My editing checklist helps me stay focused on the type of errors that I want to concentrate on. It also stops me from getting overwhelmed during the editing process. With a checklist, I can identify issues in my content, like nominalizations, passive voice, unnecessary adverbs, and weak sentence structures.
Below is a sample of my content editing checklist:
Step 3: Use Reader Mode IO
Reader Mode IO is my favourite reading app. I use it after completing my editing checklist to help me find errors. I comment on errors I find while reading my content, then continue reading until I finish the entire blog post.
Step 4: Use IA Writer
I use IA Writer to identify writing errors after using Reader Mode IO. IA Writer is a wonderful app for finding unwanted verbs, adverbs, and redundancies. I also use it to help me highlight parts of speech while focusing on sentences and paragraphs that may need to be tweaked.
Step 5: Listen to the Content
After editing my content with IA Writer, I listen to it using the Swift Read Chrome extension. This extension is great because it highlights one word at a time as I listen to the content being read aloud.
Step 6: Print It Out
The last phase of my editing process is printing out my blog post. I print my blog posts with my portable printer because I notice more errors on paper than on my computer screen. Reading content on paper also helps me slow down my reading speed to carefully focus on finding mistakes.
Final Thoughts
I hope the steps in this post help you achieve your editing goals. If you would like to learn more tips and tricks, please don’t hesitate to contact me. I am always willing to help.
Here is my contact information:
Email: Johnadeen@gmail.com
Phone number: 343-364-5185