Editing Our Posts

MS Word/ LibreOffice does the spell-check part for me... for rest of it, I'm too lazy to look back [Ashamed] ... So I'm following this thread to get some smart ways from my fellow bloggers [Optimistic smile]

Write the post without worrying about grammatical correctness. Draft it. Come back after a couple of days. Edit it. Leave it for half a day. Edit it once again. Publish it. 

Better, take a print-out, and then edit from the printed copy. Or read aloud from the monitor to edit. You'll catch more mistakes than just editing quickly on the computer screen. 

This is only for the mistakes you can identify. Trust me, there are many mistakes we make without our knowledge. We need to read grammar books or follow grammar blogs - Grammar Girl, for example, to improve our English knowledge. 

Better, submit your article to/work with an editor. They will identify so many mistakes in your article that you'll shiver before publishing any posts in future  My editor asked me if I studied English grammar in high school 

But let me admit: I HATE proofreading, like most of us here  I wish I could afford an editor for all my posts one day! 

Me Write it in draft blogger and publish it  trust blogger spell check

WP.com gives a lot of editing option...from grammar to usage  If it is an important post, I do read it multiple times. If it is just an update then I go ahead and publish it. 

I write my posts, usually in one sitting. Whatever comes to my mind, goes into the post, and thus, at times, there are chances of broken sentences and thus resulting in meaningless paragraphs. Usually, when I sit composing a post, I try not to indulge in something which hinders my thought process. This results in minimizing most of those broken/half completed sentences. Once I complete my post, I quickly go through it in the word doc, where I create my post, so as to have an offline copy of my post, in the event of something going wrong. This means that I have a backup copy of almost all of my posts in my computer (almost because I realized and started doing a bit late in my blogging career. Once done with this, I go on selecting the pictures, watermarking them, uploading them and placing the pictures at a proper place in the blogpost, after adding the copied text content I compiled in word doc. This allows me some time off the written content. Microsoft Word's inbuilt spelling and grammar checking facilities further trim down the chances of incorrect spellings, grammaratical issues with the text content. Again when I finalize my post, proper with all the pictures, formatting, captions and alt tags of the pictures, I go through it in blogger's post composing screen and again before I hit the publish button, I preview the post, and go through it. Once I am sure that there are no more mistakes in the text, I publish it all. And doing this, a mail notification is sent to all the subscribers of the blog, including me. Again I read the live post on the blog. This lets me go through it in about the 5 minute gap between the post going live on my blog and it being published on my blog's feed, and on my blog's Facebook and twitter pages via that feed. Being published on the blog's feed is more important than being published on your blog. If it's on your blog, you can always change it, but if it's been published in your feed, you can't edit it and you'll have to live with it. So, I am proofreading my post - 4 times before I am completely satisfied that the right thing goes.

Even then there have been instances that I have found issues, both typographical and grammatical, in my posts. I correct it there and then. 

And this is usually true for my essays here as well. 

I first write on paper (ALHT posts , Java posts, I directly type)  and then type it. While typing, I make a lot of typographical mistakes - about 3 per line and the first word suggested by the spell checker is often the correct word. But I am too lazy to click the 'Change' button 100-200 times.  So, I use an Auto Clicker for it.  Finally, I read the entire post once. 

Some posts are easy and come flowing out fully formed, like my personal favorite post that no one else seems to like. The satire just flowed that day and the whole thing was done and dusted inside of 20 minutes.

There are others that have taken multiple days and 12-15 revisions and these are the ones I like least and are most likely to have mistakes. I used to write offline. Now I use the WP draft button, clicking it often. I also click the preview button often to see how it is coming along. Sometimes when a post refuses to come out, I have to leave it to fester. Some I don't go back to for months on end, so I have at any point in time about 6-7 drafts sitting around doing nothing but staring at me, daring me to finish them and sometimes I do go back and wring their necks and make them cry uncle. yet, at others, I am defeated. The score now stands at something like 13-7 in my favour.

There are yet others that have been completely written and I have not dared to post them for various reasons. Too deep, too much feeling, too much emotion? I don't know. Their time has not yet come, I feel, so they sit there until I can pluck up the courage to hit Publish.

I did get one-point in English in ISC-12, btw, Anunoy S!

I think even my best posts (IMHO) come out of spontaneity rather than spending insane amounts of time on them.

Yup!

Please feel free to vent, Anunoy. I had a succession of bad teachers and then hit the gold mine in Grade 11 and 12. A teacher who treated you like an adult!

It's always good to run a spelling and grammar check as none of us is infalliable (ok maybe some are, but not the rest of us mortals).  Apart from that I like to read the post again before putting it public domain.  Once it is posted it stays posted. 

Reading a post does help me... but I find I start 'seeing' errors and blunders only after I have published it and re-read it a couple of days later. So I treat the posts on my blog as some sort of a draft version only because there have been times when I have changed words, sentences, and paragraphs after many days.

I know this is not a great habit and that all editing needs to be done before a post becomes public... well, I am slowly moving towards that state.

We need to first recognize that editing is tedious... it is slow and it exhausts... and all this is happening when you are actually raring to jump on to a new topic and writing a fresh post.

So despite all the tediousness and exhaustion, one really needs to get down to transforming a post into a grammatically correct post.

It is difficult... and even i tend to upload flawed ones. But I have one more reason that is other than simple grammatical errors for being afraid of editing. The moment I begin 'editing' I start changing everything... or want to start changing everything. So there are quite a few posts/articles that are in a perpetual editorial coma in the folders inside my laptop. These articles never made it to become anything... and are just waiting to be 'completed'.

So i sometimes feel it is better to upload and then edit... and just keep moving on. You get better with each article that you post, so it is turnover that is more important than just clinging on to one post and spending a lifetime polishing it. I mean you can always keep polishing it even after you've uploaded it, can't you?

I think the first rule is to review what you’ve written.  Personally I write the post and save it as a draft, then I'd preview it and make changes accordingly.  That does not mean that one has to write a fast draft and then focus heavily in revision.   It means you take your time writing and reviewing and then posting.  Then and this is terms of writing and probably applies more to writing fiction than non-fiction, because once I have written something then I'd rather leave it with warts and all

1. Check you have left nothing out.
2. Check every sentence, making sure it has an active verb, is grammatically correct and makes sense.
3. Review the word count, style and tone to ensure it fits the publication.
4. If you’re including photos, caption them correctly.
5. Don’t rely on your computer’s spell-checker – get a fresh pair of eyes to read through the copy, because while the spelling may be correct, the usage may not.

The advantage of publishing and moving on is that you can focus on improving based on lessons learnt from the previous attempts.  

Agreed! I have been learning from my past experiences and like what others have said, I start seeing errors only after I publish my post. What I wrote a year back seems to be loaded with corrections than what I have now. I see my blog as a place of learning of how to write better and interestingly I have improved myself in writing than what I did a year ago. 

I usually depend upon MS Word and re-editing (after it goes live). And for my freelance works, I read, re-read and again repeat the process until I am satisifed (which consumes more time).

I always write in three parts. 1. Writing the post in one go. Uploading pics and then reading it aloud once.

2. Then I go out or take a break or sleep, and read it the next day. 

3. I change my post by 40% minimum this way. And then only I post.

I blog thrice or four times a month at my Travel Blog. And this process helps me to find my mistakes before anyone else finds them :D