9 Must-Do Editing Tips That Will Improve Your Article Writing
Friday, August 8th, 2008You many not believe yourself to be a “writer”, but the truth is if you are using article marketing as one of your promotion and link building strategies you will have to figure out a way to produce excellence articles on a regular basis.
Not only does the article need to be well-written and free of grammatical errors, but there are word count limitations, as most quality publishers don’t like extremely short or extremely long articles.
I myself am naturally prone to write the epic 1500 word articles, but I have learned to edit my articles so that they stay between 700-800 words, which are the sweet spot with article marketing.
Well-written articles that are 700-800 words not only have a better chance of being picked up for publication by online publishers, but they are also ideally suited to being published by ezine editors.
These are few tips to do editing, that a writer of any skill level can do.
Read out loud. Reading your article aloud helps you notice awkward phrasing that might otherwise look all right on the written page.
Read in reverse. How many times have you written an article and then got so used to the words on the page that you overlooked some vital grammar or spelling mistake, only to notice it a week later after you would already submitted your article and had it spread to tons of publishers? Reading your article sentence by sentence, or paragraph by paragraph backwards helps keep your brain on its toes. Spelling and grammar errors dance off the page, and it becomes clearer to you which sentences should be switched around or removed entirely.
Cut, do not add. I am always tempted to make my article into a ‘War & Peace’ length feature. Cut out any words or sentences that do not absolutely need to be in the article. Believe me; a concise, streamlined article is much easier to read than one that goes repeatedly.
Justify yourself. This is one thing that in my school time my teachers pounded into my intelligence in high school & college. Each sentence, each paragraph, and each word has to earn its right to be in our article. If there are any words, sentences or paragraphs that the article could survive without, they need to get the ax.
Establish cognizance of affected language usages and remove such material. Did you know that most newspapers be written on a 2nd grade level (on purpose)? Cut out all fancy words or difficult phrasing. No one should need a dictionary to read your article.
Throw out and get rid of needless redundancies you do not need. As you look over your article, you may be amazed at the number of “pointless redundancies” that occur in your article.
Kill ugly adverbs. Student uses the example of “he ran quickly”, where ‘quickly’ is the unnecessary adverb. Why is it unnecessary?
Passive sentences are to be avoided. Why is that sentence passive? When the action (the verb) is individual done to the subject of the sentence, it is a passive sentence. Active sentences are stronger than passive ones. Therefore, in order to turn this passive sentence into an active one, we could say, “Writers should avoid crafting passive sentences.”
Good editing skills are a lifesaver when it comes to writing your articles, keeping the reigns on your word count and improving your writing class. To tell you the truth, no matter what the length of your article, you still need to do editing!

