Chapter 5: The Writing Process 4: Editing

Whatever you do, don’t quit now! Self-correction is an essential part of the writing process, one that students or professionals skip at their peril. Say you’ve just dashed off a quick email. Glancing back to ensure that it’s correct in terms of its grammar, punctuation, spelling, and mechanics helps you avoid confusing your reader or embarrassing yourself. Those errors can be like stains on your shirt or rips in your uniform: they give the impression that you’re incompetent or uncaring—qualities no employers respect because it suggests a lack of attention to detail.

Always keep in mind that people generalize to equate the quality of your writing with the quality of your work. Because readers tend to be judgmental, they may even draw bigger conclusions about your level of education, work ethic, and overall professionalism from even a small writing sample. Especially with résumés and cover letters where your words are the first impression employers have of you, employers are judgmental about your writing because customers can be. Employers don’t want you to represent their company to customers in a way that makes it look like the whole organization does shoddy, amateur work.

The final stage of the writing process is thus managing your readers’ impressions by editing your draft from beginning to end. This involves first returning to your headspace at the start of the writing process and assessing where your document is in relation to the purpose you set out to achieve for it (see Step 1.1 in §2.1). When you get a sense of how far your document is from achieving that primary purpose, you realize what needs to be done to close that gap—what you need to add, rewrite, delete, and improve. Your next move is a two-step editing process of substantial revisions and proof-editing. The order of these is crucial to avoid wasting time. You wouldn’t proofread for minor grammatical errors before substantial revisions because you may end up just deleting whole paragraphs that you meticulously proofread with a fine-tooth comb. To approach editing strategically so that you never waste your time, let’s divide the process into lessons you can apply to the editing process in the following order:

• 5.1: Substantial Revisions
• 5.2: Proofreading for Grammar
• 5.3: Proofreading for Punctuation
• 5.4: Proofreading for Spelling
• 5.5: Proofreading for Mechanics

AI Post-Editing (AIPE) for the Human in the Loop (HITL)

Before we get going, however, let’s take a moment to consider how AI factors into this stage of the writing process—or, rather, how you factor into AI’s involvement. If you’ve effectively skipped Step 3 of the writing process (shown in Fig. 5a above) by getting AI to draft a document for you (e.g., a targeted cover letter if you’ve fed the AI your résumé and the job posting), now is where you must enter back into the writing process as the “Human in the Loop.” If you took only a quick glance at what the AI spat out, thought, “Looks good enough,” and submitted the cover letter as-is along with your résumé, you may well have missed several telltale signs of AI content generation that the employer’s or recruiter’s AI can use to disqualify your application. It will be bot-on-bot cancellation, and you won’t even hear back about why your application was rejected because no human will see it. Some of these giveaways might be as glaring as bracketed placeholders (e.g., “[Your Address]” in the cover letter’s address block or “Sincerely, [Your Name]” at the end). However, others might be the subtler hallmarks of AI writing style that have crept into documentation of all kinds since 2022—hallmarks that you may not be aware of but professionals who read copy all day can instantly spot. If it somehow slips through the the AI filters and a human professional actually reads your AI-generated cover letter after all, it may well give them a chuckle about the dangers of job applicants abandoning their role as Humans in the Loop and letting AI replace them at their peril (see §9.3 for more on cover letters).

Done well, being the “Human in the Loop” (HITL) means that you carefully read and edit what AI generates to ensure that it’s fit for purpose—i.e., the purpose you identified in Step 1.1 of the writing process (see again §2.1). If AI is like a transport truck that performs most of the heavy-lifting labour by covering most of the distance in the cognitive load of the writing process, you as the HITL are the delivery cab handling the “last mile” of production through grounding (fact-checking, eliminating hallucinations), AI post-editing (AIPE), and final approval before delivering the goods to the audience at hand. Your relevance, employability, survival, and success in a world where human professionals use AI to improve their productivity rather than get replaced by it depends on your ability to operate effectively and responsibly as the HITL in moments such as this—especially if it means the difference between getting a job interview (and possibly the job itself) or remaining unemployed. This chapter equips you with all the editing skills you need to succeed—whether for AIPE or to whip into shape the content you write yourself before sending it out. Always remember why this is important: because whatever you send out—whether a job application or just a routine email—acts as a representative of your quality as a professional in the judgment of its audiences (see §1.1).