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One more set of fresh eyes
Putting extra eyes on any piece of writing is always a good thing. While I don’t have others proofread anything on this blog, I still find it helpful to put my own fresh eyes on each post when I can.
Ideally I have a buffer of perhaps 6–8 posts at any given time, so that if I’m not able to write for a few days I still have some that are ready to go. This means that by the time I publish a post, it’s likely that I wrote it a week earlier and haven’t seen it since, giving me the opportunity for my own fresh eyes.
When I publish every morning, I always re-read the post one last time to make sure it’s typo-free. A few have slipped past me, and I’m sure a few more will, but I think these posts are generally error free. A big reason for that is having that final readthrough before I push “publish”, because I almost always catch an error or two.
This gets trickier with email. If I have an important message to send, I don’t generally have the luxury of waiting a week to double-check it. This is where I’ll often literally get another set of eyes on it to make sure I didn’t miss anything.
Even better are tools like Spark and Missive, which let you literally allow teammates to peek at your drafts and help you clean them up. We don’t currently use those right now with our team, but this is a very compelling feature of them.
Do you have any good tips for getting extra eyes on your work before it goes out?
Originally published at https://www.mickmel.com on August 11, 2023.
