How to View Your Writing with a Fresh Eye

You’ve cut and honed, tinkered and polished until you can barely see your words.  You need to shed new light on your writing.  Here’s a few ideas.

• Change the font

It’s an instant ‘new look’ done at the press of a button.  When you’re familiar with a piece of work, proof-reading becomes more of a skim-through as your brain fills in what it expects to see.  This is one way to trick your brain into thinking it’s reading something new.

• Print out your work

It’s amazing what mistakes and oversights jump out when you see your writing on paper.  Reading printed text is a different experience to reading from a computer screen.  You may find reading your words in print more ‘restful’.

• Hand-write sticky sentences

There can be a feeling of detachment between you and the words on a computer screen.  A typed draft has a ‘professional’ look, whereas hand-written scribbles seem more ‘personal’ (especially when covered in coffee splodges and cookie crumbs).  By writing on paper you reconnect with your words.  So, take a sentence or paragraph that’s bothering you and turn away from the computer (yes, away from the computer) and try re-working it on paper.  It could lead to a satisfying revision and may even generate a new idea.

• Read your work out loud

Even better, record it and listen back (cringe).  You’ll hear the rhythm of the writing and you’ll gain a sense of the overall ’shape’ of the piece.  And again those jarring words and awkward sentences will leap out and box you on the ears.

• Put it to rest for a while

How long is up to you but it should be long enough to put some distance between you and the writing.  Then, when you come to re-read it, imagine you are someone else.  Pretend you’re waiting for an appointment, flicking through a magazine which contains your piece.  Does it grab you?  Is it interesting, factual and easy to understand?

• Read the last sentence first

Reading your work back-to-front sentence by sentence or paragraph by paragraph will show you if each part makes sense by itself.  If your piece is short, print it and cut it into sections.  You will see if each one has a purpose, makes its point clearly and stands as a coherent whole.

• Join a writer’s group

They can be on-line or in the real world, but they should take writing seriously and members should offer  honest appraisals (no back-rubbing).  Unless you value the opinions of the other participants (and you won’t know this until you’ve been with them a while) this is a waste of your time.  What merit would you place on a critique from a writer whose own work you think shoddy?

• Get a friend to read it

Be wary of this one.  Close friends and family don’t want to offend (generally), and so may not give you their frank opinion.  Only show your work to someone you believe will give you constructive and unbiased criticism.  Choose a friend whose opinion you really want to hear (and that doesn’t mean only showing it to people who always say your writing is fabulous!)

Hopefully some of these ideas will help you see your writing from a new perspective.