How Many Read-Throughs Are Enough?

As far as I’m concerned, you can never read through your work too many times. Ever. The notion is incomprehensible to me. When I edit, I imagine that that finished project is the me I am presenting to the world. My intention is to put my best foot forward, but of course I’m going to miss something. I can read the same piece a million times in a row and miss the same mistake each time –mostly because my brain knows how the wrong part is supposed to read versus catching the error. Everyone does it.

This phenomenon I can forgive –and actually taking breaks between re-reads of your work will help this problem. It’s people who spew words and then forget about it, or seem to do that, that are starting to get on my nerves. If you’re not a good grammarian and/or line editing isn’t your thing, ask someone else to do it.

I will not point fingers, but I’ve read too many works lately, both fiction and non-fiction, published and posted on the internet, where basic sentence errors run rampant –RAMPANT. As a reader who is giving someone my time I don’t think it’s too much to ask that person to make my reading experience as easy as possible. My time is really valuable to me and I have a ton of other stuff to read. If I have to stop and re-read your phrases four times to figure out what you’re trying to say in your FINISHED product, you’ve lost me and irritated me.

With the invention of spell checkers that also catch general grammar problems, I’m less forgiving.

This has turned into a bit of a rant so I will take a deep breath and try to get on a constructive path.

There is no magic number of times you can or should read your piece before sending it out into the world to be read. Even my personal number varies per project. Sometimes I can do two or three edits, sometimes I need 14. The point is I read –and read again– until I can’t see anything wrong. Once more, that’s not to say that nothing is wrong, just that I know the piece so thoroughly that I can’t see straight anymore.

I do have a rule of thumb I go by, besides taking breaks between edits: if you think you’ve got it down and don’t need to read your piece again, do a read–through one more time minimum.

Now of course I have to ask what other people think! I’d love to hear from readers about their takes on editing errors. And writers, if you’ve got ideas and/or editing tips, share them!

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