You want to sell your writing. One of the toughest things for a writer to do is to evaluate, coldly, her own prose. Every word’s a pearl? You’re not going for pearls, you are communicating to an audience, encouraging them to feel a response.

You want to sell your writing. Leave ego in your desk drawer. Write a piece, let the writing cool, that is, put it aside for a day. Detach.

Then read it aloud. That’s right. Out loud to yourself. You’ll hear it better that way. As you read, consider the following, widely suggested by colleges and universities, editors and publishers the world over. People you’ll sell your writing to.

Suggestions for evaluating your own writing:

• Look for cliches. Have you used cliches ineffectively or effectively? Cliches can be expressions (e.g., it rained cats and dogs), actions (e.g., the butler did it), or characters (e.g., the butler).
• Is a character’s dialogue stilted? Perhaps the language is too formal, too academic, should you use more everyday language or slang? (or vice versa in some cases.)
• Are expressions, actions, objects inappropriate for the setting? An early 20th-century character would not say “Ya da ya da ya da”, for example. (read anything by Mark Twain to see how current, for the times, vernacular fits his writing)
• Think about logical connectors. If you can’t understand why a character acts in a particular way, your reader will not understand.
• Look for descriptive and analytic details (who, what, when, where, why, and how). Young, inexperienced writers tend to over rely on dialog. You may need a narrative voice that describes and explains at critical points in the text. (Read The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin)
• For beginner pieces, you might want to write an analysis of text you have written for your novel or story – an expository text to tell you more clearly what you know and what you really want to say.
• Do your research. Fiction needs to be documented if you use factual background, settings, costumes. Check facts. (see Derrick Bell’s And We Are Not Saved for a wonderful example).
• Standard punctuation and grammar rules apply as much to fiction as to nonfiction. Unless there is a clearly discernible reason in the work for the breaking of the rules, apply rules correctly. (Read Sweat, by Zora Neale Hurston).

Once you have gone through this list and have reread your article, story, chapter or even poem with these ideas in mind, you’ll see things you didn’t see before. Make the alterations that seems wise to you.

Then read it again. You’re on your way to a very polished piece of writing that can attract attention in the submission slush pile. And then you will sell your writing.