Amplitude + Astorik's Arpit Choudhury on Proofreading
"I often spot things to change after moving the draft around."
Writing's writing, whether you're publishing in a community, sending out an email newsletter, or building a blog following. For Arpit Choudhury, building the Astorik community, running the Data-led Academy at Amplitude, and writing about data tools on his Substack, writing cut from one place can often find new life somewhere else.
Here's Arpit on his writing and proofreading workflow:
What's your favorite thing you've written recently?
That would be the latest issue of my newsletter: How Spicy Do You Want Your Modern Data Stack?
What's your standard writing workflow?
- Every new topic starts with an outline which results in the first draft
- I maintain a really long Google Doc with first drafts of a whole bunch of topics I intend to write about
- I then take a draft or a chunk of it and paste it into another doc post which I begin the editing process
- I often end up rewriting entire sections or removing them during the editing process
- Once I'm good with the 2nd draft, I do a round of proofreading
- I then get my wife to do another round of proofreading before I finally publish
What's your favorite way to proofread your work and spot things to change?
I use Grammarly to spot errors and then just reread the draft a couple of times. I've seen that I often spot things to change after moving the draft from the Google Doc to Substack and previewing it or sending myself a test email.
What do you do with the things you cut?
I maintain a separate doc where I dump everything. My posts are related to each other so the bits that don't fit into one often fit into another.
What's your ideal editing workflow?
Read the draft, make changes, move unused parts to a separate doc, preview the final draft, make more changes if needed, and publish.
→ Check out Arpit Choudhury's Astorik community, and follow him on Twitter @iCanAutomate.