Reader,

Last week I explored a reader's question: "When is your writing NOT ready?" My suggestion: YOU, the writer, get to decide the answer(s) to that question. No one can edit your work better than you can. (If you missed it, read it here.)

One reader wrote back with this reply:

Anyone who writes in public—my term for publicly posting what you write—knows exactly how this reader feels. The question is never, "Will there be any typos?" Instead, it's always, "Will there be any typos that I just can't live with?"

But I'd like to interrupt this train of thought with an important announcement:

Editing is NOT the task of finding all your typos and corrections.

This statement stands in stark contrast to most people's beliefs. Our schooling implicitly trained us to think we're always writing for a grade. Almost everything we wrote was handed in to a teacher whom we desperately wanted to please. Why? Because their opinion of our paper had a direct impact on our GPA, and we fervently believed that our GPA was a ticket to somewhere.

What's worse, many of our teachers were ill-equipped to make a positive impact on our writing. They treated our papers like exams, looking for "right answers" (i.e. opinions they wanted us to parrot) and grammatical reasons to add some red ink to our double-spaced pages.

This mindset lingers long after we leave school. Thus, when we write something we care about, we're prone to read it over with two unhelpful questions in mind:

• "Did I write the right things?" (If you're really brave, you might ask its inverse: "Did I write anything wrong?")
• "Did I make any mistakes?"

Are these bad questions? Not necessarily. But these aren't editing questions. They're matters of proofreading.

When we edit, we're asking ourselves this question: "Did I write what I wanted to say?"

Indeed, when you hire a good professional editor, this is exactly the mindset they bring to your project. They're not showing up to point out your typos (though there's a good chance they'll do that too). They're showing up to interrogate your project, to help you discover if you stayed true to yourself as you transformed your thoughts into squiggles we call letters, words, and sentences.

Like you, I cringe when I read through past emails and stumble into my typos. But honestly, I've learned not to care too much about them. What matters is whether I've said the truth I have to say. If I can answer that question with an earnest, sincere, "Yes," then I can live with a mispeling or to.

Keep your stick on the ice.

Frank.