A first draft is the first, unedited version of your article. Your content becomes a first-draft when you’re done writing all the necessary ideas down, covering all the sections, headings, and points.
However, content writing doesn’t end once you’re done writing it for the first time. Although there are people who don’t edit and polish their content, most pieces of writing need to go through a second phase of writing, which is editing.
It is a rigorous process of “editing” the content to make it flawless, otherwise, content often ends up with errors like awkward wording, vague sentences and headings, and misspelling. That’s why editing is important to make writing clear and impactful.
This article lists seven important practices of optimizing your first-draft content—whether it is a blog post or landing page content—before you hit publish.
1. Take a Break
There’s a vast difference between writing and editing. The former is the process of creating content, while the latter is the process of polishing it. Smart writing means respecting both phases, drafting with focus, then editing with clarity.
When we are busy writing content, our focus is on completing the material. Solving problems like:
How do I phrase this concept?
How do I structure this article?
How do I define this term?
What examples should I include?
But when we edit the same content, we need to shift our perspective and think differently:
How can I better phrase this concept?
How can I improve this article’s structure?
How do I make this definition clearer?
Are these examples relevant? Are there better examples?
It is this shift of perspective that allows us to see through the flaws. However, this shift requires a break from the first phase of the job.
When we’re writing an article, our mind is focused on finishing it rather than improving it, which makes us numb to the mistakes we’re making along the way. In other words, the mistakes are not within the picture. That’s why we are often unable to find our mistakes at the time of writing (and that’s why editing exists).
But when you take a break to refresh your mind and come back with a fresh pair of eyes, the otherwise obscure mistakes become visible. This is why taking a break is important; it is the first step to editing.
Take at least a few hours of break if you want to refresh yourself, though a one-day break is ideal. You can go for a walk during this time, play a game, or even take a nap.
2. Read Through and Highlight Improvements
Once you start editing your content, take a few minutes to read through it once. Use a highlighter to mark the changes or potential improvements you’d like to make, but don’t edit them right away. Think of this stage as revising your writing with fresh eyes spotting what could be stronger before you dive into fixing it. You want to highlight all the improvements you can catch with a simple yet thorough reading. These improvements aren’t the sentence-level errors like misspellings or punctuation errors, but rather bigger yet subtle refinements like:
Strengthening the argument or message. For example, a section might feel weak because it doesn't fully support the main point of the article. Maybe it lacks adequate examples or just isn’t convincing enough. Highlight this section to revisit it later and add more evidence or examples and refine the wording.
Identifying redundant information. For example, you might notice your content repeating a point. Highlight this redundancy so that you can later remove one of the instances to make the writing more concise.
Missing examples or visuals. You might notice your content lacks helpful elements like examples or visuals, which could make your guide/explanation more comprehensible. This can be crucial in some kinds of content that need to demonstrate more than talk, like social media related guides.
Once you’re done reading and highlighting throughout the content, you can easily come back and fix these subtleties now that you know the essential improvements.
3. Focus on Structure
One of the things to focus on while editing is the structure of your content. The structure is the organization of your article. It comes down to the logical flow of the content.
The first thing you need to ensure is that your article follows the basic structural flow, which starts with an intro, then moves onto the body, and ends with a conclusion:
Introduction
Body
Conclusion
The body of the content can be complex and branch out into multiple sections, which will demand your attention.
You need to focus on ensuring your content structure flows logically, especially inside the body. Beyond the headings, focus on the structure of each section. Consider:
Which idea is discussed first? And which idea is discussed later?
Is each section’s flow logical? Does each section make its topic clear?
You can go ever further and examine the structure of each paragraph. Examine its:
Topic sentence
Body sentences
Concluding sentence
This will allow you to adjust the structure of your content and make sure it makes sense. A better structure will strengthen your argument/message and make it easier to understand.
4. Check Cohesion and Coherence
Cohesion and coherence are both important aspects of impactful writing. These deal with how logical and sound your argument and writing sounds. Cohesion is the flow of your text through effective wording and grammar whereas coherence is the text’s logical flow of ideas.
These two aspects sound simple enough, but they’re often the most technical and even obscure to deal with. Not just that, cohesion and coherence are also very important in making writing more comprehensible and effective. This means, they’re a must to examine when editing.
To make your writing cohesive, make sure:
The sentences transition naturally. Use transition words for this (i.e., “thus,” “hence,” “because” etc.)
Antecedent noun is referred to by its pronouns.
Recurring words are replaced with their synonyms to add variation and avoid exact repetition.
Repeat key words or phrases, and their synonyms, to create and maintain a sense of connection throughout the text.
To make your writing coherent, make sure:
The ideas have a logical flow.
The content is structured logically.
Paragraphs also follow a logical structure (topic sentence > body sentences > concluding sentences)
5. Humanize for Natural Engagement
If you’re using AI tools to write content, it is best to humanize it for natural engagement. AI-written or -assistent content can come across as unnatural in reading. It may feel like the content has no unique writing voice, and that there’s no author behind it.
But more importantly, AI tends to write in a repetitive and mundane way. Its repetitive use of certain phrases and words make the content sound boring to readers, especially if they’re already familiar with AI’s writing.
On the other hand, humanized content can sound natural and engaging, without the AI’s predictable writing. Here’s how you can humanize AI content:
Read through the text and identify which parts sound AI-written
Replace common AI terms and phrases
Restructure sentences for a more natural flow
Vary sentence lengths for variation in text
Avoid excessive bullet points
Focus on depth and context
Use HumanizeAI.net for effective humanizing
Once you humanize your content, it will sound much more spontaneous and human-written to read; readers will likely enjoy it more than the robotic AI text.
6. Analyze and Optimize for SEO
Editing is a process of refining and optimizing your content, and SEO is one of the aspects that need refinement and optimization the most.
Take some time and examine your content’s SEO health. Is it sound SEO-wise? Do you think you have completed the on-page SEO checklist? If the answer to these questions is a “no” or “maybe not,” editing is your chance to turn it into a “yes.”
Make sure you are:
Satisfying user intent and covering all the topics your readers need to know.
Optimizing the title and headings with both primary and secondary keywords.
Using the heading tags correctly.
Ensuring a decent keyword density in the content.
Distributing the keywords evenly throughout the content.
Optimizing the meta description and title.
Making URLs short and relevant.
Linking where possible to help users—both internal-linking and external-linking.
Optimizing images with alt text.
Leveraging a compelling hook in the intro.
Writing a concise intro and making the topic clear ASAP.
Using helpful visuals to make the content easier to understand.
Hopefully, all of these boxes tick by the time you’re done optimizing the content for SEO. It will help your content reach more users and be more helpful to them.
7. Proofread for Grammar
Proofreading often comes last. It is done to find and correct sentence and word-level grammatical errors. You may need to go through your content a few more times to make sure it is grammatically sound. And while you’re at it, look for:
Spelling errors.
Incorrect punctuation, like comma splice.
Awkward wording. Read the content out loud to yourself and feel if it sounds awkward or clunky.
Inconsistency in style and tone. For example, are all elements of your content (i.e., title, headings, formatting, punctuation, etc.) following the style guide you’re using? Does the writing conform to the correct English standard you’re using (U.K or U.S)? Is the word choice appropriate for your chosen tone throughout the text, or does it shift, say, from informal to formal?
Wordiness.
Factual inaccuracy. Fact-check to verify claims and figures.
Incorrect formatting, like font size difference and indentation.
Incorrect grammar, like subject-verb agreement errors or dangling modifiers.
Proofreading can take time, but don’t rush it. You don’t want to spend so much time only to end up with a typo that people then deem as unprofessional. Take your time and proofread thoroughly, until you can no longer find any errors.
Conclusion
A first draft of content needs editing and refinement before it can be published. Editing requires you to take a break after writing and before editing so you can refresh your mind; read through the content and highlight improvements; focus on structure, cohesion, coherence, humanize the text for a natural flow; and proofread to spot any line-level grammatical errors.
