Handling Rewrites and Corrections

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 01/24 at 05:20 PM • Blogging Tips

The last session of the day was about writing good blog posts. From Halley Suitt: story, truth, passion, things of this world, brevity, freshness, voice. I’ll come back to these ideas, but I’m actually more interested in the discussion during the session of how to handle the inevitable desire to rewrite and correct posts after they have been posted.

If you’re blogging, even if it has only been a couple of days, you’ve posted and made a mistake, or used a word you want to change, or even left one out… the question is, do you go back in and correct it? And if you do, when do you let readers know you’ve made a change?

“My typos don’t show up until I publish.” --Anil Dash

Halley Suitt says she doesn’t put things up until she’s finished editing, but Stowe Boyd says he often goes back in to correct typos if it has only been a few minutes since it went live.

I know I end up doing this myself sometimes. Like Anil, reading a blog post “in context” rather than in the blog entry system almost always lets me see awkward wording and typos I missed when I was writing and editing. I will correct typos, but I usually leave my awkward sentences there to remind me to do a better job next time.

I’m very fond of using strikethru text to mark out mistakes, though I prefer to use those for correcting content or factual mistakes rather than a simple typo.

Several audience members pointed out that making mistakes is good fodder for another post. Making a clarification or an apology, with a link to the original post, is a great way to demonstrate transparency in your thought process and, frankly, to look that much more human.

 
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