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As a freelance writer, you need your writing to be professional and polished to reflect the care and quality you put into your work.
Poor grammar detracts from even the most stellar content. To ensure your freelance writing is at its best before you share it with clients, follow these best practices for grammar editing.
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If time allows, build a break into your timeline between the writing and editing phases. Do something completely different or work on an unrelated assignment.
It helps to create some distance between the work you put into the writing and the work you are about to put into grammar editing. Return to the work with a fresh perspective to help any errors and inconsistencies jump out at you.
Make sure your content is in its final form before you dig into grammar edits. If you are at a point where you are still rearranging, adding copy or reviewing the substance of the piece, wait until the content editing steps are complete before editing for grammar.
This helps you save time and prevents the need for duplicating efforts such as performing grammar edits all over again after you’ve come up with a final draft.
Breaking up your editing process into phases helps to ensure you’ve checked for all aspects of grammar. For each read-through, isolate one facet of grammar and check the entire document for related mistakes.
There are a lot of aspects of grammar to check for when editing. To avoid overlooking one of them and to help keep you organized, use a checklist to track each facet of grammar you are checking for.
Whether you make your own or download one online, keep it as a working document and continue to update it. The more written work you edit, the more common errors you will discover. Add them to your list.
Whether it’s a house style guide or a standard editorial style guide, have it on hand so you can refer to it when you have a grammar-related question. Your style guide dictates rules for spelling, punctuation, numbering, and other grammar-adjacent rules.
When you are ready to start editing for grammar, read your writing out loud. Speaking slows down your reading and allows you to hear each word. Being close to a piece of writing can cause your eyes to overlook errors, especially when self-editing. Hearing the words aloud gives you a view of your work that is more like a reader’s and less like a writer’s.
Correct spelling errors immediately. Use available grammar and spelling tools to help double-check your work, such as editing and spell-checking apps. These tools can provide very helpful backup for discovering hard-to-spot misspellings.
On your first read-through, look for missing punctuation and over-punctuation. In particular, check for missing end punctuation, comma splices and run-on sentences. When reading aloud, if you find yourself struggling to get through a long sentence, break it up into separate sentences. This helps with readability as well as grammar.
Look for missing capitalization as well as incorrect capitalization. Generally, capital letters are reserved for the beginning of sentences and proper nouns. It’s a common error to capitalize words that seem important. If you find a capitalization error, search the document to find and correct additional instances.
Review your document to ensure that singular subjects are paired with singular forms of verbs. Plural nouns should be paired with plural verbs. When performing this search, read aloud again. Your ear will usually pick up subject-verb disagreement right away.
Your content should have a consistent verb tense throughout the piece.
Then, also remember to check for passive voice, which tends to be wordier and more challenging to understand. Active voice is usually more concise and clear.
Example:
Incomplete thoughts equal fragments, not sentences. Fix any sentence fragments by turning them into complete sentences with a subject, verb, and complete thought. Sometimes, fragments can be used creatively for emphasis. If it is mindfully done and it works, go for it. If it’s awkward and feels like something is missing, fix it.
A misplaced or dangling sentence modifier can stop a reader in their tracks and confuse your message. As you read through your work, make sure the words or phrases used to describe a noun appear in the right place. Sometimes, this requires a little rewriting to achieve clarity.
Examples:
Changing the order in which you read the content can help you catch grammatical errors you missed the first time around. If you start at the last page and read toward the first, you force yourself to have a new perspective.
If you’ve been writing and editing on a backlit screen for hours, it can help to print out your work and change your environment. Whether you sit in a cafe, move to a different room, or print out an article, it can be a refreshing way to change your perspective.
Especially when self-editing, a grammar tool can quickly pick up on those grammar-related typos that are so easy to miss when you are close to a piece of writing.
Once you’ve been through your writing back and forth and have every aspect of the grammar edit checked off your list, it’s time to get a fresh set of eyes on the final draft. Someone unconnected to the writing may find things you missed.
Grammar editing is time well spent. After all the time and effort you put into researching and writing, perfecting grammar is necessary to deliver professional-level content to your clients.
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Then, discover more grammar and editing tips in our guides:
