Why You Should Edit Your Substack Posts

Listen. Edit. Revise.

Photo by Madalyn Cox on Unsplash

I’m a writer on Substack, but I’m also a book editor. One of the positive things about this wonderful platform is that anyone, anywhere, anytime can post whatever they want. However—this also means that there’s no literary journal or magazine editing your work.

As a reader on Substack, when I encounter multiple typos in a post, or sloppy diction, or bad grammar, it turns me off. Disclaimer: I myself am far from perfect. I’ve made mistakes. A few times other writers have pointed out to me—a couple times publicly—errors in my own posts. But for the most part my writing is more or less error-free.

Finding bad or sloppy grammar, syntax, punctuation or typos makes some readers lose sight of the bigger picture; the post itself. It’s sort of like walking out to a podium on stage to give an important company speech while wearing only boxer shorts. Most people will focus not on the speech but on the speaker’s nearly naked body. Dress your prose appropriately so that we get the meat of your message and don’t focus on the smaller window-dressing.

Sometimes I find posts with blatant errors. I always feel embarrassed for the writer. At times it comes off as fast, sloppy writing, other times as simply bad writing. One tool I use every time I post is either Microsoft Word’s ‘Read Aloud’ function or if on my iPhone I use ‘Text to Speech.’ This plays back what I’ve written so that I can *HEAR* it. The voices are AI-generated. You can adjust the speed. This way you can much more easily hear when a word is wrong or missing or a comma is needed or a word is misspelled, a paragraph too long, a phrase clunky, etc. I usually read a post a few times before hitting ‘send.’

Because Substack is not a publisher but rather a platform for writers to publish their own work, it’s on writers to make sure we do copy editing, line editing and developmental (structural) editing. No doubt it’s trickier if you post multiple times per week. Self-publishing has given millions of aspiring writers the chance to get their work out there. Broadly speaking, this is a good thing. But with that opportunity comes responsibility. The more mistakes writers make in their own work the more it slowly degrades the Substack writing culture and community. If we can’t produce proper prose on the page, how can our ideas be trusted?

Sometimes freedom is too much to handle. We have almost unlimited freedom here, which is largely , theoretically fantastic. But there are no editors looming over our shoulders, telling us to fix this or that. We have to do that ourselves. It’s like having children AND homeschooling them at the same time. It’s all on us.

Call this a Public Service Announcement. I’m not here to judge; I’m here to help. Put yourself in other readers’ and writers’ shoes. Imagine reading typos, misspellings, uneven grammar, unstylish syntax, lazy sentences. Consider what that feels like. It sort of feels like a light slap to the face. Like the writer doesn’t take you, or themselves, completely seriously. While that’s probably most likely not the case 99% of the time, it can often feel that way. And perception, as we all know, colors experience.

~Michael Mohr