For longer pieces, such as booklets and multi-page reports, light editing might be necessary throughout various phases in the writing composition. Sure, you can perform a full edit once you’ve completed the entirety of the piece, but a soft edit should let you clean up what you have in the meantime.
Why would you even want to edit before a complete draft? It depends upon you. Some people find it easier to proceed to the next phase of the content (e.g. the next chapter of a novel) when everything before it is sufficiently cleaned up. Others like having the basic facets of the text (e.g. grammar, spelling and readability) corrected early on, so they can focus on more complex portions of the piece during the latter parts of the writing process.
Running the text through a software-based writing tool, doing some basic proofreading and reading the copy for clarity are some of the quick steps you can employ during this activity. It won’t take plenty of time, but it should save you from a lot of corrections and adjustments that you may need to do to the text anyway if you perform a full edit later. Since it’s a light edit, rather than a full on rewriting, try to avoid doing too much changes to the piece. Save the big work for later.
Let’s say a light edit of one chapter shows you an average of ten things you could fix up. If you’re writing a book that features ten chapters, those are 100 things that will pile up with many others during a full edit. Getting rid of them early on with a light edit should make your later work just a tad less imposing.
