Editing and Proofreading Rules

Editing is not one pass — it's several distinct passes done in a fixed order, each looking for a different class of problem, because trying to fix structure and commas in the same read means you miss both. Never proofread a draft whose structure is still wrong; you'll polish sentences that get cut in the next round.

The pass order

• Structural pass first: does the piece argue or explain things in the right order? Is anything missing that the reader needs, or present that doesn't earn its place? Fix this before touching a single sentence — a sentence-level fix on a paragraph that later gets deleted is wasted work.
• Clarity pass second: for each paragraph, is the point immediately clear, or does the reader have to work for it? Reorder sentences within paragraphs, break up ideas that are doing too much at once, and make sure the first sentence of each paragraph carries its point.
• Line pass third: work sentence by sentence — rhythm, word choice, redundancy, sentence length variation. This is where a draft starts sounding good to read aloud, not just correct on the page.
• Proofread last: spelling, grammar, punctuation, formatting consistency. Do this only once the content itself is stable — proofreading a paragraph that's about to be rewritten is time you don't get back.
• Never collapse these into one pass under time pressure — do a fast version of all four in order instead of a slow, thorough version of only one.

Cutting length

• Target cutting 10-20% of a first draft's length on the clarity/line passes combined — most first drafts carry that much padding without the author noticing, because it accumulated one phrase at a time.
• Cut throat-clearing openings ("In this section, we will discuss...", "It's important to note that...") — get to the actual sentence.
• Cut redundant pairs where one word already implies the other ("each and every," "basic fundamentals," "past history") down to the single necessary word.
• Cut a sentence entirely, don't just shorten it, if removing it changes nothing the reader needed — a shortened unnecessary sentence is still an unnecessary sentence.

Passive voice

• Flag passive constructions ("the report was reviewed by the team") and convert to active ("the team reviewed the report") by default — active voice is shorter and states who did what.
• Keep passive voice deliberately when the actor is unknown, irrelevant, or being intentionally de-emphasized ("the bug was introduced in v2.3" when who introduced it doesn't matter to the reader) — passive isn't wrong, it's a tool with a specific use.
• Search for "was," "were," "been," and "-ed by" constructions as a fast way to locate passive voice across a draft during the line pass.

Filler words

• Cut qualifiers that weaken a claim without adding information: "very," "really," "quite," "actually," "basically," "just," "somewhat." If the sentence is true without the qualifier, the qualifier wasn't doing anything.
• Cut hedges that avoid commitment without adding real uncertainty ("it seems that," "one could argue," "in a sense") unless genuine uncertainty is the point being made.
• Cut meta-commentary about the writing itself ("as mentioned above," "as we'll see," "needless to say") — if something needless to say, don't say it.

Consistency checks

• Check terminology: the same concept should have the same name everywhere in the piece — a mid-draft switch from one term to a synonym reads as an error even when it isn't one.
• Check formatting: heading capitalization style, list punctuation (all items end with a period or none do), number formatting (spelled out vs. digits) applied the same way throughout.
• Check tense: don't drift between past and present tense describing the same events without a reason.
• Check names, dates, and numbers against their source on every appearance, not just the first — copy-paste edits are where these silently diverge.

Preserving the author's voice

• Edit for clarity and correctness, not to make every draft sound like the editor wrote it — a good edit is invisible; the author should recognize the piece as their own, just clearer.
• Keep distinctive phrasing, sentence rhythm, and word choices that are stylistic rather than actually wrong — don't "fix" something that's merely not how you'd have written it yourself.
• When a change is a genuine judgment call rather than a clear error, flag it as a suggestion rather than silently overwriting it, especially in collaborative editing — let the author make the final call on their own voice.

Final proofreading checklist

• Read once specifically for spelling and grammar with no other goal — mixing this with a content pass causes both to be done worse.
• Read links, code snippets, and any quoted material character-by-character against their source; these are where silent errors hide because they look plausible at a glance.
• Read the piece once more after all edits are applied, start to finish, to catch any inconsistency the edit itself introduced.