In what way do you find it easiest to edit your work? Do you read backwards? Do you print things out or read it digitally? Do you prefer making corrections as you find them or writing them down and taking care of them all at once? My editing process for things like schoolwork usually go like this. Once I've written up my piece, I'll read it over a few times on the doc itself and make edits, making sure it follows all the requirements of the assignment. Then I'll print it out, grab my handy purple pen, and make corrections on the paper. After that, I'll go back to the digital document and add those edits in. What's your process like?
Well in terms of writing fanfics, when I finish writing it I'll look it over a few times. Sometimes I leave it in Docs before uploading it as I think about things I may want to change. Like, "is this reaction realistic? is that description necessary?" those kinds of thoughts often go through my head. In regular writing, I kind of do the same thing, but I'm much more critical and I end up changing entire paragraphs. Usually I try to change the wording and it goes on from there.
Whenever I write anything down, I try to read it aloud to make sure it sounds right, as if it were something anyone would say normally. Though, this only really works for speech bubbles in comics and dialogue from characters in written works. Meanwhile, while writing short stories and such, I also try to imagine what someone might be doing physically to portray a certain emotion rather than just outright saying it. For example, rather than saying "he was angry", I use "he was pouting/ crossing his arms/ stomping his feet in a tantrum" etc. That way, it makes the characters seem less static, and paints a better picture of them in the reader's head. Overall, I usually just write whatever comes to mind, and then re-read it over and over to make sure it all sounds okay, and fix whatever sounds out of place.
If I'm writing something, I'll try to read through it as I go, just in case some really obvious mistakes happen to slip through my notice, and I may backtrack over some paragraphs to re-read and fix mistakes right then and there. This is helpful, but only about 10% of my proof edits are done in this stage. To really get to it, after I'm done writing or crafting up whatever portion, I stop, step back from it, and don't come back to it for a great while - usually a day. (If I'm in a rush, I may wait for morning versus evening, but the intent of stepping back from my work is still there.) After that time has passed, I get to the proofing. I scrutinise my work thoroughly, looking out for every little thing. I'll generally read it to myself as I go along, just to make sure I don't miss things. As I do so, I look not only for obvious spelling and/or grammar mistakes, but I'll also look for portions where I feel I could word things better, or clearer. These are the incidents that take me the most time, because as I get better with actual command over the language, the amount of spelling/grammar mistakes decreases, and what's left is to make sure I make the best word choices. This process may repeat several times before I'm totally satisfied, and in more professional settings, I will usually repeat this process about 3 times, before I reach a point where I believe the work is presentable. For my own personal writings I don't usually go beyond 2, though I may revisit something months from when I wrote it and refine it even further - or sometimes even scrap it entirely. I act as needs must, to make sure my work is the best that I can make it.
I used to just edit-as-I-go, but being in college one of the important things I learned from my literature professor are the various better editing techniques that others have already mentioned - reading it out loud, printing it out and editing by hand before putting said edits into the document, getting other eyes on it (especially if they're willing to speak it out loud to me), and so on. It's really helped my nonfiction writing.
I edit as I write. If I have an idea, I think through that idea and edit it until its something I like then I put it down on paper and move on. Actually revision of the paper is far different. I can barely read and even if I did read to edit, all my focus will be on successfully reading the paper and not checking for problems. So instead, I have someone else read it aloud for me. This generally fixes all mistakes and allows me to find problems in my logic to fix.
I would first write out everything I will want to. After that, I will read through the document to find any errors and parts that I can change / improve on !
For me it depends on how long the text is. If it's something like writing a short article between 10 and 20 pages, I'll usually finish the whole thing first, then go back to the beginning and read it over, making corrections as I go. It helps to take a decently long break, at least half an hour, between finishing the first draft and going back to correct any errors. For something longer like the book I've been writing on, which has just reached 460 pages (yay!) I'll usually write as much as I can, then over time go back and proofread earlier chapters. Once it's done, I'll probably go back and look over the whole thing again, reading it as I would any other book. I've developed this habit over the past couple of days of writing around 10-15 pages in a day, then going over what I wrote the next morning. It really helps, especially with including details I might have forgotten about or glossed over the first time through.
Since I hand write a lot of my stuff (mainly fanfics) I type it up and when I'm typing I'll go back and write stuff in, or flesh out ideas. Most of that happens because when I would hand write it, it would be at like 2AM so most of it was nonsensical.
