5 terrible ways to edit your content

If you create content long enough, you end up making all of the mistakes. And some of the mistakes that I’ve made over and over again is in editing my work.

I’ve written a couple of other articles about the importance of editing and the different techniques I use to edit my writing well.

🔍 Related: To write is to rewrite

Over the years, I’ve also learned (and unfortunately experienced) five terrible ways to edit your content.

Let’s talk about those five mistakes.

1. Don’t polish out the truth

When you consume a really great piece of content, you naturally recognise the truth — at least one person’s truth about a topic. Truth in content is raw vulnerability.

It’s what separates mediocre content from content that lingers long after you finish the last sentence.

Please don’t edit out the truth in your content.

I get why we do it. The truth can feel too raw and too vulnerable. Many times we don’t want to be so exposed to the world. Yet, it’s this naked expression that elevates our content above the average pedantic prose.

So, let your truth live freely. Wrap it in disclaimers if you must, but don’t constrain it so tightly that it has no room to breathe.

2. Don’t sell your soul to robots

Grammarly is a great tool for catching mistakes in your writing content. If you struggle with spelling and punctuation as I do, Grammarly can save your career.

However, don’t depend entirely on Grammarly, or any other “robot,” to help optimise your content.

As much as I use Grammarly for almost all of my writing across platforms, I don’t always agree with its suggestions.

Use editing tools like Grammarly, but don’t sell your soul to the software. No software will ever replace your unique style and voice in your content.

And that’s why people love to consume your work.

3. Don’t cling to beautiful content

One of my favourite bits of content creation advice is to “kill your darlings.”

Your ‘darlings’ can be a character that you love, a scene, a line of dialogue, or any sentence or video clip in your work.

I’m obsessed with beautiful sentences. Yet, sometimes, they don’t fit in my article or story. They stand out too much, seem too try-hard, or distract the reader from the actual message.

Don’t cling so tightly to beautiful content that you leave them in when your audience is better served by taking them out.

Keep in mind that you can always use beautiful content in another article, story, or video. You don’t have to completely delete and eliminate these wonderful snippets that you’ve created.

Beautiful content is an incredible accomplishment, but that doesn’t mean it deserves to be in your current work.

4. Don’t edit past discomfort

The best content is often uncomfortable. So many times in my life, I’ve edited out the discomfort.

I did it to make myself feel good, and the result is that I cheated my reader out of a more profound experience.

Great writing doesn’t take shortcuts around pain, darkness, trauma, and other vulnerabilities. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if your content doesn’t make you a little uncomfortable, you’re probably not writing deep enough.

To be sure, you don’t want to offend everyone. Writing is not an attack on your audience. However, writing is meant to instigate thought and emotion. Discomfort is a wonderful way to stir the soul.

5. Don’t crumple up your dreams

In a famous story that you might have heard about, Stephen King crumpled up his first draft of Carrie and threw it in the trash bin.

His wife, Tabitha, later retrieved the crumpled-up manuscript, read it, and encouraged Stephen to continue it. She thought that the story was worth pursuing.

Carrie became Stephen King's first hit; earning him an astounding $300,000 and allowing him to quit his job as an English teacher.

This might be the first and only time I’ve ever recommended anyone not be like Stephen King.

Don’t edit out your dreams. Don’t crumple up your vision for your work. If you can, find yourself an incredible supporter like Tabitha who will rescue your content dreams from the bin.

Final thoughts

I’ve made each one of these five content editing mistakes more than once, and some at the same time. I’ve diluted and ripped the soul right out of my content whether that be an article on my websites or a video on my YouTube channel.

Content creation is hard, but content optimising is where you make the money.

It takes time, focus, and an intuitive sense of creativity to know what to leave in and what to take out.

Real mastery is in revision.

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