A simple trick for more effective self-editing

Ideally, every writer would have an editor — someone else to proofread and edit. Unfortunately, most lawyers and others who write for a living don’t have that luxury; we have to be our own editors.  How can we self-editors acquire that fresh set of eyes that a someone-else editor brings to the project?

One trick known to most writers is time. Between writing and editing, put the draft down, do something else for a while, and come back to it later. As Bryan Garner writes in The Winning Brief, “the more time you can put between the draft and the editing, the better your judge [your editor] will work.” Whether this gap is as long as several days or as short as 15 minutes, it will help you “look at your words through different eyes ....”

Here’s another trick for helping yourself see your own writing with fresh eyes: Change the typeface before printing it out for editing. This tip comes from Susan Bell’s book, The Artful Edit, by way of Gretchen Rubin and Joanna Young. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but it makes sense.