Building Your Extroverted Internal Editor

Editing your own work is difficult for a variety of reasons, but the biggest hurdle for many students is the fact that because they know what they meant to say, they believe that is what they did say. In order to learn to see the words on the page as they actually exist, you need to practice.

One common technique is to read your work aloud. This is a great option, and we recommend it highly. However, even reading aloud you can fill in words that you dropped in the writing or correct grammatical errors without even realizing it. Use this technique in a variety of ways; be flexible and even a little goofy. Try reading the last sentence first, and then working backwards to the front. That will help you make sure that each sentence makes sense. It can also help you build strong paragraphs because it will highlight whether the sentences in a given paragraph are all related to one another and the same topic.

Try reading your work aloud while standing up or using a different voice. If you write and read the work at your desk, for example, it makes it easy to fall into the trap of reading what you think that you wrote. Standing on your bed, reading the work aloud in a dramatic voice with broad gestures can help you hear it as if someone else wrote it. In addition, when you come to a sentence that is not what you want to be, you can look away from the paper, and speak the sentence as you want it to be. Then you can write the sentence you spoke! Transferring into your best skills as a speaker into your writing is a great way to improve both skills.