It doesn’t matter what sort of writing you do; online or print, you must know that editing is as important as writing. The act of writing is mostly comprised of getting your words down while they are flowing. You may end up with sentence fragments, little or no punctuation and typos because you get into following the words. Once you have it all down, then you have to take on the task of editing your work.
The first step is to read what you have written and correct any typos, punctuation and grammar errors that catch your eye. Then you should also run a spelling and grammar check to make sure that you’ve caught them all. A final read-through will enable you to catch words that aren’t misspelled but that the grammar and spell check didn’t catch because they are real words.
Use the right words
Words such as decent and descent are often skipped and even some instances of transposing letters can be missed. For example if you flip the letters and type no instead of on, it probably will get through the checks. While automated checks are handy, there’s no substitution for the human factor of reading the piece. To really check for readability and usage, read the article aloud and you’ll catch any other instances of awkward phrasing and punctuation.
In conclusion
No matter how close you may be to a deadline, always take the time to proofread and edit your work before you submit it. In some instances, there may not be an editor to tweak your work before it goes live and how you submit it will be how it publishes. You can also lose clients due to simple editing mistakes. No one is perfect and sometimes something will slip through but always make the effort to submit your best work.