For any piece of writing, knowing when to stop editing is as important as editing itself.
Whether it’s an article, an essay, or a book manuscript, over-editing can be a mistake. The more you edit, the more chance you have of losing your writing voice.
The value of editing is greatest in the early stages. However, it can diminish when it becomes a process of changing rather than improving.
Continued editing can make you feel productive, but it can also be an excuse to delay publishing.
How do you know when to stop editing?
Correcting and editing are two separate stages.
Checking for grammar errors, spelling mistakes, punctuation issues, or simply catching typos is the first step.
It’s much easier now than ever before, with all the tools available to make the task easier and faster.
You might agonize over a few commas here and there, but correction is a straightforward process.
Once you have made all the corrections and proofread your text for any remaining typos, the correction process is pretty much finished. But it’s not so clear for editing.
Editing is all about improving a text. You want to make it easy to read, but at the same time, you don’t want to over-edit and risk losing your original ideas.
Another danger is changing the way you write, which is your natural writing voice.
If you write in a friendly, informal style, rewriting your sentences or passages in a slightly more formal style is often a mistake.
If you find yourself editing for the sake of editing, that’s usually a good sign that you’ve done the job.
Like any process, it has a beginning and must have an end.
What to avoid in your editing process
Many writers are perfectionists, and that can make self-editing a long, drawn-out process.
An independent editor usually knows when the job is done. Without being as emotionally invested in the text as the author, it’s often easier to know when it’s time to stop.
But authors and writers are very attached, and that can make it difficult to stop changing little things that are really of no consequence.
It might be changing this to that, or a to the, or adding a comma only to remove it again.
That’s tinkering, not editing.
Even for a short text, I sometimes find myself fiddling, making tiny changes, and putting it off until the next day.
While it’s sometimes a good idea to “sleep” on a text, it’s not always beneficial. It’s not going to automatically improve itself overnight.
Yes, you might be fresher and more aware in the morning, but I rarely make more changes.
One thought to keep in mind is that mistakes and errors occur in a lot of famous published works.
It’s also not unusual to spot problems in newspaper articles and well-known websites.
A perfect text in any form is a rarity.
That doesn’t mean you should be careless, but it also means that being a perfectionist can be a waste of time.
One of the best ways to know when to stop editing is when you know you would be happy for someone else to read it.
If you’re happy for one person to read it, it’s probably ready for many to read it.
Keep your processes separate
When you mix correction, proofreading, and editing together, you can lose track of where one task starts and another finishes.
It’s always better to keep these tasks separate because you then have clear goals for each stage.
Stage one: Correcting
Correcting your grammar, spelling, and punctuation has a clear endpoint because when there is nothing obvious left to correct, it’s finished.
Stage two: Proofreading
In this stage, you work from beginning to end, looking for minor errors and typos that your correcting stage missed.
Even with online correction tools, the results are never perfect, so it’s up to your eyes to find the last few annoying errors.
Stage three: Editing
Now, you can get to work on improving your story, essay, or article to make it easier to read and understand, without compromising your writing style.
You might rearrange or rewrite sentences, fix small plot holes in a story, or add more detail when you believe it will improve your text.
For some parts, you might want to trim them to remove irrelevant details.
With nonfiction and article writing, adding references to support your argument or thesis is often a way to strengthen your text.
When you finish these tasks and you are confident that it’s ready for your readers, it’s time to stop editing.
Stage four: Final proofreading
It’s your final safety check, and you will probably find one or two little gremlins. Catch them, correct them, and move on. Your text is ready.
Don’t make editing an excuse
It’s easy to fall into the trap of forever editing because it feels productive.
With book manuscripts in particular, it can also become an excuse to delay publishing.
While readers won’t be impressed with a book full of errors and typos, if one or two escape, it’s not the end of the world.
If you’re self-publishing, you always have the safety net of being able to correct and update your book or ebook, and republish an updated version.
For an online article, it’s even easier to fix errors and publish an update.
Summary
You have to stop editing at some point because it can become a pointless exercise of making changes for the sake of making changes.
If you keep in mind that editing is about improving, not changing, it gives you a better perspective.
When I think about editing, it always reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s famous quote.
“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”
If you’re at that stage, it’s the perfect signal for you to stop editing.
Related Reading: Should You Edit While Writing A First Draft?
English teacher, writer, and author. Passionate about grammar, creative writing, and self-publishing. Always exploring new tools and tech to help writers succeed.
