Editing For Yourself Vs. Editing For Others

It's no surprise that I love to edit. I talk about it a lot on my blog, and being that I'm an English major and former English teacher, it's kind of a given that I love red pens and the screen equivalent—Track Changes.

Today topic came by request. :) I edit my own work and the work of others, and the two are very different. Here's why. When I edit for myself, I'm too close to the story. I know things about my characters that my readers don't. That means when I fail to mention something that's key to the plot, I may not realize it until my editor points it out. Then I have a moment where I want to smack myself in the forehead. To try to cut down on those moments, I've done the following things when revising my own work:

• I keep track of the passage of time: what day it is, what time it is, etc.
• I keep track of major events and key reveals. *This is important because it's what I need my reader to see and know.
• I keep character profiles to make sure eye color, hair color, height, etc are consistent throughout my manuscript. I also mark where they are mentioned in the document.
• I mark overly used words and replace or delete them.
• I read my work backwards (not word by word, but sentence by sentence) to check for spelling and missing words.

When I edit for others, plot holes jump out at me because I don't know the story. It's so much easier to pose questions to my clients than it is to myself because I don't have the backstory in my head like the writer does. Here's a short list of how I edit for clients:

• I highlight overly used words.
• I bring up any questions I get from a reader's point of view. If I have those questions, the reader will too. Now sometimes, the questions get answered later and I'll comment that the questions are answered. But if not, we have a problem for the writer to address.
• I check for consistency with the spelling of words. Gray/grey and toward/towards are the two biggest culprits I find. Either way is acceptable, but consistency is needed throughout the manuscript. The same goes for capitalization. If you create a term and capitalize it once, you should continue to capitalize it throughout.
• I mark any shifts in POV. If you are writing 1st person, don't leave that person's head. If you have dual POV, make sure you are only in one character's head at a time. Etc.
• I check contractions and read them as two separate words. So many times I see "you're" when it should be "your". If you read the contractions as two words, you'll see when you really meant to say "your" instead of "you are".
• I read my work backwards (not word by word, but sentence by sentence) to check for spelling and missing words.

Again, this is a short list. I could go on, but I'd rather hear from you. What does your revision check list look like?