Let the text cool off

One of the things I most disliked about being a newspaper reporter was often having to finish a story in the last minutes before deadline.

At that time ours was an afternoon paper, meaning the deadline for reporters was around 11 a.m. I would come in at 8, finish up any stories begun the day before, then head over to city hall to make my rounds. If I turned up a good story, I would either phone it in to the rewrite desk or, more often, rush back to the newsroom to get my story written before deadline.

The problem was not just having to write under deadline pressure, but also not having the time to review my story before turning it in. To be sure, there were copy editors to catch most of my errors, yet I always felt my work would have been better if I could have let it set for at least a couple of hours, then come back to it with something like fresh eyes.

Roy Peter Clark

Writing coach Roy Peter Clark calls this letting the text cool off. A few days is even better than a few hours. The longer the period of time before finishing a piece of writing and reading it again, the more likely you are to find not just factual errors and spelling errors, but also awkward phrasing, awkward sentences, missing words, repeated words and so on.

When you have just finished writing something, whatever it may be, you know what it is supposed to say, so you are less likely to notice that that is not what it actually says. A cooling-off period gives you the chance to look at your work fresh, almost as if it were written by somebody else and you don't know what to expect.

"The cooler the text, the more clear-eyed the revision," Clark says.

Later in my career I turned to writing editorials and columns, where I could usually work ahead, finish a draft hours before deadline and then come back to it with new eyes. I liked that much better.