Self-Editing Checklist: 10 Common Mistakes to Fix Before You Hire an Editor

A professional edit is one of the best investments you can make in a manuscript. It is also expensive, and much of what an editor is paid to do is work you could have done yourself. That is not a criticism of anyone's writing; it is how drafting works. The first version is you finding out what you think, the second is you deciding what to keep. The ten faults below turn up again and again in submissions. Fix them before you send your pages out, and your editor can spend their time on the hard questions instead of tidying things a slower read would have caught.

Story and Scene Problems

A protagonist with a vague want

A scene needs someone who wants something specific, now, and meets resistance. 'She wanted to be happy' will not carry a scene. 'She wanted the deposit back before her sister noticed it was gone' will. If you cannot state the want in one sentence — X wants Y, but Z — you do not yet have a scene. Rebuild it or cut it.

Scenes that start too early and finish too late

Look for the two paragraphs of weather, waking up or driving to the door before anything happens, and cut them. Enter as late as you can and leave as soon as the turn has landed. The same applies at chapter level: an ending that explains what the reader should feel is weaker than one that stops on the sentence that does the work.

Repetition You Stop Noticing

Every writer has tics, and they are invisible while you draft. Search for yours — most word processors will count instances of a word — and read a few pages aloud with a pen in hand.

• Filter words: felt, saw, heard, noticed, watched, realised. Often you can drop them and let the image stand.
• Hedges: just, quite, rather, somewhat, a little, almost.
• Crutch adverbs: suddenly, immediately, actually, literally.
• Body-language repeats: a shrug, a raised eyebrow or a bitten lip on every third page.

Then check for saying the same thing twice. 'Nodded his head', 'shrugged her shoulders' and 'thought to herself' are redundant pairs; the verb already tells us. The same goes for explaining after you have shown: a character slams a door and the narration adds that she was angry. Trust the door.

Dialogue That Does Not Sound Like Speech

Cover the speech tags with your hand. If you cannot tell who is speaking, the voices need separating. Give each character one habit and hold to it: one speaks in clipped fragments, one is over-formal, one never finishes a sentence. Then read the scene aloud. Anything you stumble over is worth a second look.

Four smaller fixes, in order of how often they appear:

1. Replace fancy tags. Said and asked are invisible; anything else draws attention to itself.
2. Cut the adverb. 'He said angrily' is weaker than a line that is actually angry.
3. Use names sparingly. People rarely say each other's names twice in one exchange.
4. Trim the beats. Too many small actions between lines slows the page to a crawl.

Consistency: Tense, Viewpoint and Detail

Tense and viewpoint drift

Past tense sliding into present is easy to miss in a scene you have rewritten several times. Read the first sentence of each paragraph and check the verb. Viewpoint drift is subtler and more damaging. If a scene sits in one character's head, the narration can report only what that character can see, hear or infer — no other character's private thoughts, no detail from across the room that nobody noticed.

Names, places and timeline

Spell every name the same way every time. Check that a journey taking three days in chapter two does not take one day in chapter nine, and that your characters keep the eye colour and accent they started with. Keep a style sheet: a plain document listing names, spellings, capitalisations, invented terms and how you punctuate them. It takes an hour to build and it is the most useful thing you can hand an editor.

Mechanics and Formatting

Punctuation habits worth breaking

Comma splices, sentences joined with a dash, and ellipses used for every pause. Choose one interruption mark and one way of writing an ellipsis, then apply it throughout. Decide whether you are using single or double quotation marks — UK fiction conventionally uses single, US uses double — and convert any imported text so your apostrophes and quote marks match rather than mixing curly and straight. Hyphenate compound adjectives before nouns ('a three-day journey', 'a well-kept secret') and leave them open afterwards ('the journey took three days', 'the secret was well kept').

Word-processor mess

None of this affects the writing, and all of it distracts the person reading your first pages:

• Double spaces after full stops, or a space before a comma.
• Tabs or strings of spaces used to indent paragraphs.
• Both first-line indents and a blank line between paragraphs.
• Manual line breaks at the end of every line, or headings that only look like headings.
• Tracked changes and comments left switched on.
• Inconsistent chapter headings and scene breaks.

Keep the presentation plain: a readable font at twelve point, double spacing, page numbers, and one clear way of marking a scene break

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