Chris Wiegmanyou’re working on your latest post one of the best things you can possibly do is to step away from the computer before you publish it for the world to see. Get up, leave the room, close the browser, and forget about all that work you just put in.
Forgetting that we’re all human and make mistakes is one of the biggest mistakes a blogger can make. Typos, bad grammar, and posts that just don’t make any sense are far too easy to create when we’re in a hurry to publish and for that reason we must step away from our computers before we publish our work.
How many times have you gone back to your old work after a day, a week, or even longer only to find something in that didn’t work. Maybe it was a simple mistake, maybe it was something more serious, but in the end it doesn’t matter. The act of revisiting our work after we have removed it from our minds is often enough in and of itself to find problems with what we wrote.
I’m as guilty of it as anyone. In my rush to post three times a week I’ve faced the humiliation of having a user point out a typo or other error in my work, something I should have caught on my own but my own impatience got the better of me and I published without ever going back over the post first with a clear head.
On the other side of this, I read a lot of posts on a lot of blogs each day and one of the ways I weed out the good from the bad is by looking for quality writing. If the author made a typo once or twice I can overlook it however if I go back to a site 4 or 5 times and still see the same mistakes across a number of posts then something is wrong. Clearly the author doesn’t care much about their own work and as a result I’m not going to care about it either. I’m going to move on to someone I trust, someone who cares about the details enough to convince me they care about the research they did to build their content in the first place.
So here’s your task for your next post. Go ahead and write it. The walk away and don’t touch it again until you’ve published 2 or 3 other posts using your normal workflow. Then, go back and re-read the first post you wrote. I can almost guarantee you’re going to find something that you will want to change, something that makes that post less than perfect.
If I’m correct and you did find something you could improve in that one post, how are the rest of your posts? Try to make a habit of never publishing anything on the day you wrote it. Go back at least a day later and make sure what you wrote really is your best work. A little objectivity in your own work can go a long way to building trust with your readers.
Edit:
I originally wrote this post 3 days ago and so thoroughly forgot that I had written it that I just stumbled back into it by accident. In the process of editing I’ve fixed 12 errors (yes, I kept count). Hopefully you won’t find any more.