The cooling-off period will allow you to gain some objectivity
(although you will never be totally objective about your own work,
and you shouldn’t be).
Pull out your mind map to make sure you’ve captured all the
points you planned to, and nothing extraneous has crept in. If you
find that you’ve recorded random thoughts unrelated to the sub-
ject, cut them out regardless of how beautifully they’re expressed.
Put yourself in the reader’s position and think about the questions
she might ask; make sure they’re answered.
Now go over whatever remains, using a checklist of the specific
problems you need to look for, misspellings and dangling modi-
fiers, maybe, and also the almost-right word, the soft passive voice
construction, the vague reference.
Where will you get such a checklist? You’ll create one by keep-
ing a pad of paper with you as you edit the next couple of pieces
you’ve written, noting the sorts of mistakes you tend to make.
That’s another one of those forward-thinking tasks that takes extra
time now but will save a great deal of time later.
If you want a reference to help you with the editing, keep the
Associated Press Style Book handy to settle questions such as 6:00
a.m., 6:00 A.M., 6:00 a.m., or 6:00 am, for example. For grammar
and structure questions, you can rely on The Elements of Style,
by Will Strunk and E. B. White. Whatever style guide you use,
remember that consistency is usually more important. Readers can
adjust to the way in which something is expressed (with the pos-
sible exception of typos), but it tries the patience if the reader is
asked to continually readjust.
A Cautionary Note about Editing
Don’t even think about not doing it.
You’ll save a little time, all right. But you’ll spend that time and
more, writing the second and third memo clarifying the first one,
holding the meeting to explain what you really meant, or explaining
C O M M U N I C AT I O N S