Edit Your Content: A Checklist of 12 Things Not to Miss

Here's a checklist for rereading your content before you publish. For anything important, i.e. that's being sold or delivered to clients, I use Barbara Feiner, a professional editor. She not only corrects errors, but evaluates for clarity and flow.

But for blog posts and everyday content creation, I put on my editor's visor and those green sleeve thingys, and act like a detached newspaper editor with a red pencil. Here's what I look for:

1. Common typos like theirs for there's, your for you're, that or which for who, and all those pesky things a spell check won't pick up.
2. Grammar goofs: My most common are when the verb doesn't agree with the noun, as in "Here's my mistakes…"
3. Review for commas, semi-colons, ellipses and em dashes. The important thing is for it to read well, read clearly. Helps to read it out loud.
4. Review for paragraph and line spacing, since I like to break up long blocks of text.
5. Review for bolded words and insert subheadings where needed.
6. Separate a blog post after 2-3 paragraphs so that it goes to the extended post feature ("read more…"