I\’ve written a lot of content since I became an online publisher. I\’d like to think that I\’ve got better and better as the years have gone by but sometimes I\’m not so sure.
Although there are plenty of posts that still make me proud when I read them again, there\’s also no shortage of articles that really make me wince.
They might have sentences I want to rephrase, points that aren\’t made clearly, and ideas that were only half-thought through.
Whatever the problem, what all of these posts have in common is that they all went up quickly. I wrote them, read them, and then put them up right away.
Big mistake.
When you\’ve just finished writing, it\’s almost impossible to spot the errors. Instead of reading what you\’ve written, you remember it. So if a sentence is missing a word or if you\’ve repeated a phrase, you just don\’t see it. Your mind isn\’t examining the words on the page, it\’s recalling the idea you had when you wrote them down.
When you\’re writing a blog post or any page of Web content then, it\’s always a good idea to leave a gap between finishing the writing and starting the posting.
Ideally, that gap should be overnight but if that\’s not possible, try to make it as long as you can.
So if you know that you need to get a new post up today, you could write the post in the morning, lay it to one side then read it through and upload it in the evening.
Giving the post to someone else to read can be helpful too, but when you\’re posting a lot of content, it\’s not always possible, and a friend can\’t always spot the errors as well as you can.
Fortunately, that\’s true of readers too. They can be a lot more forgiving than you might expect… and of course, one of the best things about the Internet is that if you do post something you don\’t like, you can always go back and change it!
Do I take my own advice? I don\’t know. Can you spot any typos in this article? ;-)