It’s time for our monthly writing tip. The astute among you will notice we skipped February—apologies for that—but we’re back in the routine again.

As I’ve said before, bad writing costs you time and money. It causes defects and delays. It irritates clients and annoys colleagues. Ideally, you’d write your best work the very first time. It would be perfect. Concise. Erudite. Error-free. The reality? No-one writes like that.

Instead, we get our ideas down on paper or onto the screen in whatever form they come in. And then we need to edit.

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If you’ve been following our blogs, you’ll know that we discourage rework. It’s one of the classic Lean wastes. But good editing adds value. It recognizes the reality of the way we write and ensures we’re putting our best work out every time.

So for the next few writing posts, I’m going to focus on editing tips and tricks. If you don’t already have it, I have an editing checklist you can download.

My first tip is short and sweet. Edit EVERYTHING you write.

It is remarkably easy for a typo to slip into your work, especially if you’re texting, writing your email on the train as you commute to work, or composing a response on the tiny screen on your phone.

Sure, we’re all busy. Maybe your friend or your mom can forgive the odd typo. That’s not the case with clients and colleagues, though. Typos and grammar errors make you look sloppy. Silly mistakes tell your readers either they don’t warrant the time or effort required to write properly, or you don’t know how to write properly. Neither is good.

Effective editing starts with tricking your brain.

Read your email, or your text, or your memo back to yourself out loud. No scanning! Read every word. If it helps, start at the end of each sentence and read backwards.

Our brains see what we want and expect to see and make automatic corrections as we read. That’s why typos can be so challenging to spot. By reading backwards or reading out loud, we force our brains to see the words differently.

Want a great example? I contributed a chapter to a book last year, and it was only when I got a message from the main author recently, apologizing for the typo on the book’s cover, that I noticed that the word “lawyer” was misspelled. None of the rest of the contributors (all lawyers) had noticed either! Why? Because we’d seen the title so many times that our brains just skipped over the error, told us the word was “lawyer,” and that was that.

Spell-check would have picked up the mistake (laywer instead of lawyer) but nobody checked the cover page.

That’s it for today. I’ll be reading this out loud before I post it (and running a spell-check) but if a mistake slips by, please let me know!

Don’t forget to get your copy of the editing checklist, and then join us next week for more on building a profitable and productive law practice.

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Thanks a lot everybody! See you next week