One of the most annoying things I stumble upon on Steemit, Medium and any other website where blogging is a popular activity, is articles that approach more or less interesting subjects, but are so poorly written that whatever the author says, makes no sens.
And I can understand that not everyone is a native English speaker. I'm not one myself. I started learning English after elementary school was over, watching PewDiePie on YouTube, playing video games and transforming Google Translate into my best friend.
But there are all kind of people out there on the Internet who believe that no matter how they write things and no matter how little time they spend on their articles, people will follow & upvote their content and they'll make a lot of money.
If you're one of those people, let me tell you now - you're not gonna make any money. Usually people look for great articles to upvote, either to support great content creators or to get something in return for their upvote in case that article is gonna receive some money.
Editing your articles is important, and writing in decent English is something that's gonna keep your readers interested in what you have to say. You could be talking about the most important subjects in the world and people won't think you're serious if your English is broken.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are some people who take editing at a completely different level and they spend literally hours editing and tweaking 500 words articles. They want everything to be perfect and they won't publish until they think there's nothing better in this world than their work.
While I published several articles talking about how you should never wait for perfection and how you should publish when you have something decent or good, I never really talked about how much time you should spend editing your articles and how good your English should be, because a lot of people who are barely starting to write don't really know anything about that.
Here's what you should know - your goal when it comes to editing, isn't to create the perfect article, but to make sure there aren't so many grammatical mistakes or ideas poorly explained that people won't understand what you're trying to say.
Your writing CAN have mistakes from time to time. Mine have, and I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who don't spend 6 hours a day making sure their English is perfect. People still read our articles and they don't complain about the grammar.
That's because one or two mistakes in your article won't ruin the reading experience of the reader. Yes, it may be annoying to stumbled upon a poorly written sentence from time to time, but if the article is interesting and the rest of it is well written, well, then nobody will care that much about that bad sentence.
Your goal should be to not force your readers to reread the same sentence 3 times in order to understand what you're trying to say.
So how much time should you spend editing your articles? Well, it really depends mainly on how long your article is. I write two articles a day and I publish them on Steemit, and each of them is around 500 to 600 words. I usually don't spend more than 10 minutes editing each article.
This way I make sure that there aren't too many mistakes in there, that people can read my articles fast enough and that they can understand what I'm trying to say, while also not having to spend hours and hours making sure my grammar is perfect.
Learn what's the perfect amount of time you should spend editing your articles and don't aim for them to be perfect. Use services like [Natural Readers](naturalreaders.com) if that helps you edit your articles faster, and don't spend half of your day trying to impress everyone with your perfect grammar.