Table of Contents
If you have a story that you’re wanting to share with your friends, family members, or just the people of the world, one great way to do this is to publish your own story online. However, before you go putting your rough draft out there for everyone to see, you’ll want to do a bit of editing.
To help ensure that whatever you’re posting—be it a funny story you’ve concocted or a history of your life since you’ve moved into your assisted living community—is well written and will be a hit with your audience, here are three tips for editing a story before publishing it online.
Read Everything Out Loud
Once you have the copy that you’re ready to start editing, one of the best things to do is to start reading everything out loud.
Oftentimes, since you know what you’ve written and are familiar with your own voice in writing, if you simply read what you’ve written to yourself, you might unintentionally fill in some holes in your writing that you’ve left. But when you slow down and read everything out loud, it can be much easier to see if there’s something you’ve omitted or a jump that you’ve made that the audience may not have made with you. Even just reading it out loud to yourself and no one else can help you see things that you otherwise may have missed.
Edit For Clarity And Purpose
Another thing that you’ll want to edit for when writing a story is how well you’ve conveyed the purpose of what you’ve written.
For many people, once they get in the groove of writing, their words can easily lose their point somewhere along the way. But unlike with being able to read aloud to yourself, when you’re reading and editing for clarity and purpose, you may want to get someone else to read your writing for you. Since they don’t know already know the story and what you’re trying to convey to them, they’ll better be able to pinpoint any places where you might have lost track of the purpose and narrative.
Change Anything That Pulls The Reader Out Of The Story
Something else that you can edit for and ask any readers you’re having help you edit look for as well is any place in the story where something pulls them out of the flow of what they’re reading. This could include things like a grammatical error, a factual error, overuse of a certain word or phrase, clunky prose, or other errors.
While things that distract a reader will vary for each person, if you can find errors that you and other people have noticed, it could be well worth your while to change those things before you publish your story online.
If you want to soon publish one of your stories online, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you edit if beforehand.
