Anyone who watches sports–football, baseball, you name it–sooner or later will hear the announcer say about a ball thrown by the pitcher or the quarterback, “Boy! I’ll bet he’d love to have that one back.” But it’s gone, for better or for worse.
One of the best features in having a website is being able to go back into something you’ve written and posted for all the world to see–and brother, do we mean all the world!–and edit it.
What we call tweaking. Fine-tuning. Improving, amending, correcting, fixing. You get the point.
I suppose the process is similar for others who do this sort of thing, but sometimes you reach a point where you feel, “That’s all I can do for this article,” and you quit tampering with it and go ahead and post it. My son Marty showed me how to post these things a couple of years ago, thus cutting out the middle man (himself). It’s good to be able to do that. (If I sound like a 1940 model pleased that he knows how to do something in this technological age, I plead guilty.)
Then, once it gets on the website, the writer is able to read it as others do. That helps the writer see it more objectively and it’s how the flaws often stand out. A sentence doesn’t read right. I used the wrong word. Used a word twice in the same sentence; need to find a different choice for one of them. What did I leave out? What did I include that should have been left out?
The process of editing calls for me to back out of the blog and go through another series of clicks to enter the editing room. I read back over the manuscript (so to speak), and tweak it. Add a comma, shorten a sentence, and so on. At the end, click “save,” wait until it assures me the changes have been made, and voila! the article on the website has been improved.
At least, that’s the plan.