Everyone has their own different editing habits. Some people read over their story once to look for typos, twice again to look for typos, and then they post. Others don’t even go that far and post right after it is written. (Shame on you!!) I get crazy, and if I actually like what I have been working on, I will spend a day, two days, up to three days even reading over my work looking for every problem that I can spot on my own.

But it has gotten worse! I’ve now drawn someone else into it. Having that one person look over it before hand makes me feel good: they didn’t find any typos, they pointed out what should be fix, they give me new eyes to look through. It is real comforting. It’s a little too obvious how crazy I am about editing before I actually post…

But what is the point of this? When I’m post, I’m getting my work critiqued, so I can edit it. So why do I edit before when posting it is just going to leave me with more editing? Okay, now, you could say I’m a perfectionist (Which my close friends would not deny) or that I like to look good (I can’t deny this one) but really, it is becoming for me a way of proving to myself that I can write, and edit, on my own. You can’t live on critics to make your writing perfect for the rest of your life, can you? You need to eventually learn what things you do wrong most of the time, and watch for them. You need to know what is wrong, what the reader won’t like, and now how to change it. Now sometimes things like sentences because weird, or the reader not understanding something, isn’t under your control because not everyone is the same, which is the advantage to getting many critics. But I still believe that in the end we should work toward being able to edit our own works, at least so that we don’t have more work after posting ;-)

So, question! What are your pre-post (in case that confused anyone, because ‘pre’ is before and ‘post’ can also mean after X_X; I mean to say, before posting) habits? Are you ritualistic like me, or just throw it out there knowing the critics will catch all your errors?