Visual Cheat-Sheet for Editing to Help You Move Faster
This post is an excerpt from Content Marketing for Startups -- specifically, the Growth Guide on the left there -- which I created at NextView Ventures. (There is no info-capture to access that PDF.)
Few things are more frustrating as a writer than watching the world around you de-prioritize editing. Editing is actual, meaningful work and should be treated as such. It's the last defense in making sure you don't wind up with egg on your face, whether due to misspellings or incorrect facts or plain old terribly-written paragraphs. (Yes, those paragraph things matter.)
But editing can suck up a lot of time, and you can always write more, tweak something, or remove something. (There's a reason you can't get a perfect score on a college essay, after all.) But because you have goals to hit and other projects or priorities on the horizon, this idea of limitless editing poses a huge problem. Do you risk suffering the consequences by not editing or do you sink tons of precious resources into examining your copy, your research, and your quality?
The answer, of course, lies somewhere in between the two. You need to spend your energy and resources editing things commensurate with their importance. Remember that perfect is unattainable, but quality is not. Quality is non-negotiable.
So to help you move faster without skimping on that quality, here's a cheat-sheet you can use to edit your work while still moving quickly through the process.
Note that some of the terminology may refer to the rest of my content marketing blueprint.
(Click to enlarge or right click and save the file.)
What do you think? Is there anything missing? Or any tricks you like to use to edit that could be added? Let me know @Jay_zo or leave a comment below!