How To Edit Your Writing in 3 Passes

A guide to consistently producing clear, dense, and solid writing

Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

It’s the single biggest drawback of writing online: your work lacks the forced scrutiny of an editor, yet editing remains the best tool to improve your writing.

The ideal process is simple enough:

1. Write.
2. Review.
3. Edit.

That’s called deliberate practice. To critique your work once it’s done, find mistakes and fix them. It’s what the pros do. But not us. We stop at the first step. Because it’s urgent. Always.

Right when I started writing, I learned how Neil Strauss edits:

“The first draft is for you, the second for the reader. The third draft, and a lot of people don’t do this, is for the hater.”

Of course I didn’t take his advice back then, because one, who has time for self-editing and two, that sounds vague. It’s hard for me to read my own work imagining I’m my biggest fan, let alone a hater.

What I can do is look for themes. Finding it again years later, I translated Neil’s advice into the following three:

1. Clarity, to ensure your writing is free of clutter.
2. Density, to keep your reader curious.
3. Solidity, to make your argumentation sound.

For the past four weeks, I’ve been using these themes to edit my writing in three passes. I call it the CDS approach. Today, I’d like to share that process with you. You can use it to improve any initial draft.

Let’s get you set up.

Getting Started

Of course you can edit in your preferred setting, whether that’s a print with marker and pen, your favorite word processor or right on Medium, but here’s the version I’ve used to create the example for this article:

1. Grab a screenshot of the whole text using Fireshot.
2. Open said screenshot in Skitch.
3. Annotate.
4. Make edits in the document.