Your cursor is right next to that clunky sentence, but fixing it right away could get you into trouble. You could make it grammatically perfect and not notice that the sentence is in the wrong paragraph, that the pronoun it refers to is undefined, or that you’re leading into a statement that doesn’t surface for several more pages. Your initial read-through shouldn’t just be about making corrections. Think of it more as getting a general sense of where the draft stands before it is littered with track changes.
Select a short passage and read through it without making any changes. Don’t pick up the keyboard and don’t try to correct grammar or wording while reading. Ask yourself what it is that you’re trying to accomplish in this piece. What is the primary goal? Who is the intended audience? How is it written? What is its basic order of events? If something isn’t clear, highlight or add a comment without making any alterations, just flag the confusing areas. Use this first pass to identify confusing areas, redundancy, abrupt transitions, and missing linkages as long as the current structure remains intact.
When reading, try to view it by its paragraphs. You shouldn’t be viewing it based on individual clauses and words. What role does the passage play, and is it in the most logical order for the passage it is meant to illustrate? Does an example get introduced before its point is known? Could this two sections be combined as they are essentially rephrasing the same idea? Is there a contrast promised, but never delivered, in between the sections? These structural problems should be prioritized over the mechanics because once you have made a sentence or paragraph perfect, you may find it difficult to move or remove that paragraph if you’ve already invested time in making it shine.
When you start out as an editor, you may feel the urge to show that you’re working by showing how many edits you’ve made. This may mean editing words that aren’t necessarily errors, changing the author’s voice to make it sound better, or editing a section without a clear understanding of its purpose. This tendency is only amplified with the use of a grammar checking program, in which the suggestions you get are framed more as directives than suggestions. Treat each suggestion as a question; perhaps the word choice is a bit ambiguous, but it could also be used on purpose, technical jargon, or even a stylistic choice by the author that should be left intact.
Once you’ve finished this uninterrupted read, write a few lines that summarize your findings. It could mean the draft has no clear paragraph order, is too repetitious, or is using too many variations for a single term. Then, based on your findings, plan your focused pass for the text. If the meaning is unclear, add an author query rather than try to edit it in. If the logic holds, try to improve the flow or wording of the sentence. Grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling are the final items on your list to check.
When you’re finished, you should feel that while you’ve made few, if any, changes, they will have made all the difference in subsequent edits. You will know what needs fixing, where to leave as-is, and which ones are only ambiguous in their context. The ultimate goal is that you’re not only able to find an error and fix it, but you’re able to find an error and explain why it is an error.