What is your editing process?

I want to know what goes through your mind when you edit. Whether it’s on fluther or in other writing you do, I want to understand your editing process. Why do you edit? What do you look for? How many times do you edit? What does editing feel like—i.e., what emotions do you feel while editing? Who do you edit for? Why do you care? Why do you feel you need to edit?

I don’t like to edit. I will read over questions before I post them and often I will find one or two spelling errors or typos and sometimes a word left out. Very rarely, I will find something I want to say a different way. Usually that’s in the title, since I find that once I write the details, the question might be different from what I thought it was. I almost never edit answers.

I write long, run-on sentences, but that’s because I use a stream-of-consciousness style. It helps me think. Every once in a while I’ll try to chop it up, but then it feels like the writing has hiccups. I like to put “well” or “so” or “and” at the beginning of the sentence, anyway, so it hardly seems worth chopping things apart.

One thing that I think is very important is putting a new paragraph at the beginning of a new thought. I usually do this during the first draft, though. Once I find out what I’m going to say, I’ll go back a sentence or two and put in a couple of hard returns at the right place.

Lack of paragraphs is something that annoys me about other people’s writing—people who I know edit. I guess it’s not something they are looking for.

Do you make a lot of mistakes? Do you edit because you don’t like the way you said things the first time? Are you overly fussy about your writing? Are you afraid you might embarrass yourself? Tell me about it.