How to Perfect Your Content by ‘Redrafts & Edits’

Redraft­ing and edit­ing work side by side and are very closely related. You need to redraft and edit in order to a turn a thought­ful, well-planned piece of con­tent into a pol­ished text that read­ers will be inter­ested to read.

There’s just too many blogs out there that have com­mon spelling mis­takes and illog­i­cal use of gram­mar. I can’t stress how impor­tant this last step is to ensure loyal return­ing read­ers! If you can cre­ate a struc­tured argu­ment that flows and makes sense — you will get read­ers in given time. I’m going ded­i­cate this arti­cle for the best meth­ods of fine-tuning your nearly per­fect con­tent.

Redraft­ing and Edit­ing for Ideas

The first step is to look closely at your ideas.

• Check your plan. Have you omit­ted any­thing that you need to include?
• Have you actu­ally fol­lowed through on the promises you made to your read­ers with the topic title/introduction?

If your aim is to be per­sua­sive, have you con­vinced them your points?

If your aim is to be cre­ative, is your con­tent interesting?

If your aim is to explain, is your arti­cle clear and concise?

There’s noth­ing wrong with mod­i­fy­ing your point of view as you study a sub­ject, but it is wrong to dis­ap­point your reader’s expec­ta­tions by argu­ing a dif­fer­ent case from the post title/introduction — don’t stray off the topic and main­tain your author­i­ta­tive posi­tion as an author as you ‘inves­ti­gate’ or ‘fol­low’ up on your points.

Redraft­ing and Edit­ing for Structure

The sec­ond step is to look closely at your struc­ture and ensure that the ideas develop log­i­cally and the whole piece is flu­ent. These are just a few sim­ple ques­tions that can help you ver­ify the coherency of your content;

• Does your intro­duc­tion lead log­i­cally to the body of the writ­ing piece?
• Have you included all the links between para­graphs to make sure that your writ­ten piece is fluent?
• Can your reader read this piece with­out stop­ping and start­ing to see where each point leads? If not, make sure that you edit your piece so that your reader is guided smoothly through the ideas.

You should be aware that mak­ing a writ­ten piece flu­ent is majorly depen­dent on how you use “link­ing words”. Build­ing up a bank of link­ing words and phrases to help you mark a log­i­cal build-up of points. There’s lit­er­ally thou­sands of link­ing words in the Eng­lish lan­guage but here are few that I use reg­u­larly; firstly or finally, fur­ther­more, more­over, to conclude.

Edit­ing for Expres­sion, Gram­mar and Spelling

If I was asked to define “redraft and edit” in just one sen­tence it would be; the process you com­mit to make sure that you do not dis­tract your reader from what you have writ­ten. This may seem an obvi­ous thing to say since you want the reader to con­cen­trate on your writ­ing that you have put such time and effort into, but many writ­ers make the mis­take of leav­ing in spelling mis­takes and typ­ing errors that inevitably inter­rupt the reader’s appre­ci­a­tion of what you have to say.

Don’t be lazy to fix up your spelling mis­takes and gram­mar struc­tures — you should spend time on writ­ing your con­tent and equally time on edit­ing. Make sure you check your expres­sion and your writ­ing in an appro­pri­ate tone rel­a­tive to the content

Lastly, I just want to empha­size that you should never neglect to check spelling, gram­mar and punc­tu­a­tion for accu­racy. A sim­ple change of words can make your con­tent that much clearer, that bit more effec­tive and much more memorable.

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