When we settle down to edit ourselves, what do we miss?
Science may only understand 10 percent (or less) of the workings of our phenomenal human brains, but writers know that our own noggins autocorrect mistakes and fill in gaps before we even notice they’re there.
In other words, what makes us good readers can make us poor self-editors!
Or maybe we’re too close to our work to be truly objective. What structural problems? Plot hole where? No logical flaw in that! Whaddya mean I haven't clarified Aunt Suzie's obsession with button collecting?
Or too attached: Nooooooooo it’s perfect! I love every sentence! My precious, precious, precious words! (spoken to yourself in the voice of Andy Serkis' Sméagol/Gollum…)
Sometimes we can't see the forest for the trees. Or, erm, the better phrase choice for the clichés.
Try this nifty trick, borrowed from the poets.
Treat each individual sentence as a line break. How? Take a paragraph and copy it into its own Word doc. Then, use your return/enter key to insert a line break after each period. Double space between each sentence so you can see each phrase in true isolation from its paragraph mates.
Editing one sentence (and only one sentence) at a time, divorced from all other content, forces you to look at each word, clause, noun, verb, piece of punctuation, etc closely to make the whole the best possible sum of its parts. When writing works on the sentence level, writing works well.
Once you've finished each sentence, put them all back together into paragraphs.
