The practice of editing your own manuscript before sharing it with beta readers, critique partners, or professional editors.
Self-editing is the process of reviewing and improving your own writing before anyone else reads it. It involves stepping back from your work, reading it as critically as possible, and making changes at every level, from story structure down to word choice. Self-editing is a skill that improves with practice, and it's a standard part of every professional writer's workflow.
Your first draft is a conversation with yourself. Self-editing is where you start making it a conversation with your reader. The better you get at catching your own weak spots, the more useful feedback you'll get from editors and critique partners, because they can focus on the deeper issues instead of surface-level problems you could have fixed yourself.
Drafting and editing use different parts of your brain. Trying to do both at once slows your drafting and produces weaker edits. Finish the draft first, then switch to editor mode.
You'll always have blind spots in your own work. You know what you meant to write, which makes it nearly impossible to see what you actually wrote. Self-editing makes your manuscript better, but it can't replace a fresh perspective.
Effective self-editing means multiple passes with different focuses: one for story and structure, one for scenes and pacing, one for prose and dialogue, and one for grammar and consistency.
Give yourself distance. Put the manuscript away for at least two weeks. When you come back, you'll read it with fresher eyes and catch problems you were blind to before.
Open a chapter you haven't looked at in at least a week. Read it once silently, marking any spot where your attention drifts. Then read it aloud, marking every sentence that makes you stumble. Compare your two sets of marks and fix the five worst offenders. Notice how the chapter tightens up.