Editing your own work is hard to do

The biggest complaint proposal and technical writers have (tied with five others) is how difficult it is to edit ones own work. It is particularly difficult when you only get three minutes between the last edits the team has and when the proposal is due.

Do a quick Google search and you will see how many people have thoughts on how to edit your own work. To me, the most interesting come from Anna Goldsmith's guest post on Copyblogger. Her post, Five Easy Steps to Editing Your Own Work advises:

1. Just walk away and leave your draft for awhile — I like to leave it for a day if I can.
2. Imagine you’re not you — Instead imagine you’re your intended audience. Does it make sense, will the reader understand what you’re trying to say, does it hold your interest, is all the information there?
3. Is your writing PHAT or FAT — Trim long sentences, slim down words and add some white space.
4. Listen to your high school English teacher (except when it’s best to tune her out) — Make sure it is error-free, check for the correct use of homonyms, confirm that all names are spelled correctly, avoid the passive voice (good luck here!), check your margins, use of spacing and consistency in style of headings — font, bold or not bold, capitalization, etc
5. Now clean it up and read it again. Out loud — Yes, that's right. Those around me have certainly heard me reading aloud. It works. Usually I also start on the last page...

Be sure to read Anna's full post here.

Tom Sant has some great points on editing in generally, which I wrote about in Proposal editing? No really, proposal editing!