When it comes to content marketing it's your ability to engage your audience with your brand, but there’s no shortcut way to get your audience to turn on you. Getting your audience to engage with your brand starts with publishing great content with no typos and other errors.
A solid story and fun examples certainly make a great article, but publishing an article full of error-free and no grammatical mistakes will strengthen it for the reader as well as a search engine.
Once you’ve completed your article draft, that’s when the real work of editing begins. As a writer, you struggle with the editing process, even the most experienced writers also. If you want to create quality content, it makes sense to improve your editing skills.
Editing your writing is difficult because your brain already knows the message you’re trying to convey, so it’s easy to skim over mistakes without actually seeing them.
We will spoil a few editing procedures or a few important areas, you may focus on to fix your writing and become a more effective independent content producer.
The first step in self-editing is to read your first draft more than one times and ensure you haven’t made any spelling, punctuation, or grammar mistakes. Grammar gives shape to sentences. It is how you arrange phrases in your sentences or paragraphs to make meaning. There are many grammar rules, along with homophones (it’s-its, they’re-there, here-hear), verb forms, or the subject-object-verb order.
You will also need to pay attention to punctuation while self-editing. It is essential to analyze when to apply common punctuation marks like commas, periods, and question marks, as they add readability in your sentences.
Filler words are unnecessary, redundant, or meaningless words we use to fill the little gap that occur while we decide what we’re going to say next. When it comes to writing, though, we need to be more aware of them, because they often distract from the message you are trying to convey.
Common filler words include, almost, slightly, very, seriously, really, some, rather, little, even, just, perhaps, maybe, seem, and that, etc.
The next step in self-editing is ensuring that use simple words in place of complex words. A very simple answer is, simple words are easy to understand, whereas complex words are hard to understand. So, don’t overcomplicate your writing with complex words use a simple word to convey your messages that should be easy to understand.
Next step you should avoid to use the same words multiple times within the same sentence or paragraph. Repeated words in the same sentence or paragraph can weigh down your writing and slow down readers or sometimes it hurts your search engine ranking.
The use of active voice is important while writing content. It improves the readability of your content and reduces wordiness. Sentences written in active voice are more direct, precise, and engaging than those reported in passive voice because they concentrate on who's doing an action.
Any writer who neglects the above focusing area is never truly going to have finished the article. If you find it hard to focus on the main area of writing, fear not, there are many tools available in the market that can help you in editing so you can deliver good quality content.
But as a writer, have you ever wondered which tools can help you most to prepare an error-free draft? While picking a writing tool, we usually get confused because there are so many options available on the internet. But we have collected four writing tools that will result in super clean content.
English involves rules and it is pretty normal for writers to forget the basic grammar rules they might have learned in high school. The truth is that no one is perfect, even the most experienced writers make mistakes while writing content.
Grammarly is one of the most effective online editing grammar checkers and proofreaders. It catches all the handful of spelling, grammar, punctuation mistakes and refines your draft by checking for you don’t even know. It also helps with word choices when you start repeating the same terms.
Nowadays, Grammarly gives individual scores for different aspects of your writing, such as scores for clarity, engagement, correctness, and delivery.
Its premium version offers detailed writing suggestions, plagiarism, and passive voice detection. If you don't mind buying software, Grammarly can be a great addition to your writer's tool belt for editing your freelance articles. You get access to browser extensions, in-app editing for systems like WordPress and Google Docs, and more.
Grammarly and Ginger have a lot of similar features. Ginger uses a patented algorithm in the field of natural language processing. Its unique algorithm understands the context of sentences and enables you to correct your writing and it also offers recommendations for word choices and rephrasing sentences.
All that happens through browser extensions, its web app, or downloadable software (if you’re an OS X user).
Today, Grammarly focuses more on giving you points for different aspects of your writing. Ginger, on the other hand, doubles down on proofreading grammar, sometimes catching mistakes that the first misses.
Overall, if your main concern when editing is spotting spelling and grammatical errors, Ginger is a reliable option to use in your browser.
The Hemingway app is a writing and editing tool that helps you refine your copy by illuminating adverbs, passive voice, confusing sentence construction, and other common errors.
You can use its writing mode for a diversion-free experience or switch to editing mode to point and correct the mistakes in your writing, and enhance its readability.
Editing your content is hard, and if you consider yourself more of a content writer than an editor, it can be hard to know where to start. This is where Editor Hemingway comes in. This tool helps you polish your writing skills. Paste your content into the app and Hemingway Editor will show you where you can improve. Highlighting problems ranging from difficult-to-review and easy-to-understand sentences to basic grammar and spelling mistakes, this tool gives you a great space to start editing.
ProWritingAid is an online editor, writing coach, and style guide, all rolled into one. ProWritingAid is a web editor and plugin that will clean up you’re writing by detecting grammar and spelling mistakes, plagiarism, and contextual errors. It highlights a range of potential pitfalls in your writing and produces reports on writing style, sentence length, grammar, and repeated words and phrases.
ProWritingAid also has more software integrations than any other editing software, including MS Word, Google Docs, Scrivener, Open Office, and Chrome so that you can edit wherever you write.