You’ve spent the time to do the necessary research, you wrote the press release, blog post, or feature article, but you’re still not done. It’s time to edit. So many people find it difficult to edit their own work, but you must. Becoming a good editor of material you’ve produced takes much time and effort, but you’ll improve over time.

Here are a few tips:

Cut it. Imagine that after including the obviously needed information, and explaining the technical jargons, there might be a 300-word difference between your word limit and what you have written. What do you do at this point? An old editor of mine always said: “Words don’t bleed.” Sometimes you just have to cut it.
Read it out loud. Reading something out loud helps you to identify issues such as lack of fluency, sentences that are way too long and other factors negatively affecting the quality of your writing.
Walk away. When you’ve spent hours working on your writing you become very familiar with it. The chances of easily identifying errors then become less. Leave it for a few hours, a day even and then begin editing again with fresh lenses.
Read it backward. This sounds somewhat looney, but it works. Read word by word from the end to the beginning and you’ll find that grammatical errors begin to show themselves.

Writing isn’t always fun and easy, but it’s worthwhile.