How to Edit Your Own Work Without Hating It

Self-editing works best when each pass has one job. Structure first, sentences second, words last, and commas only when you are rested.

Deadlines help, but only when they are real. A deadline that everyone knows will slip is just a date on a calendar.

The finished piece rarely looks like the plan. That is fine; the plan was only there to get us started.

We keep a running document of things that went wrong on past projects. It is not a list of failures so much as a list of warnings, and we read it before every kickoff.

Why it matters

We schedule unstructured time on purpose. Some of our best ideas started as an afternoon with no plan and a stack of old magazines.

Reading work aloud is the cheapest editing tool there is. Your ear catches rhythm problems that your eye skips over, especially in long sentences.

• One idea per paragraph
• One job per sentence
• Concrete nouns over abstract ones
• Verbs that move

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

Dorothea Lange

Constraints are underrated. A fixed word count, a single typeface, or a two-colour palette forces decisions that an open brief lets you postpone forever.

The first version of anything is a question, not an answer. Treating it that way makes feedback easier to give and much easier to hear.

Reading work aloud is the cheapest editing tool there is. Your ear catches rhythm problems that your eye skips over, especially in long sentences.

We keep a running document of things that went wrong on past projects. It is not a list of failures so much as a list of warnings, and we read it before every kickoff.