The 10-Point Self Editing Checklist I Run as a Judge
The exact ten-point checklist a contest judge runs on every poem before anyone sees it, with a before and after edit showing why point seven saves more drafts than talent does.
Last November I scored a poem that should have won. The imagery was strange and exact, and the ending landed like a dropped glass in a quiet kitchen. It placed fourth. The reasons were small and fatal: two typos, a tense slip in stanza three, and a closing line that repeated the title's best word without seeming to know it. The poet had a winner and shared it one read too early. That is the whole case for a self editing checklist. Not because rules make poems good, but because a repeatable process catches the small failures that make good poems look careless.
I have read thousands of contest entries, and I can usually tell within ten lines whether a poem was checked or merely finished. Finished poems glow and wobble. Checked poems glow and hold. Below is the exact list I run on my own drafts before anyone sees them, and the one I quietly wish every entrant ran before pressing send.
Why You Cannot See Your Own Draft
Your brain is a loyal liar. By the third read, you are no longer reading the page. You are reciting your memory of the page. You wrote "the the" and your eye glides over it because you know what you meant, and knowing what you meant is precisely the problem. Proofreading your own work feels easy for the same reason it is nearly impossible: the author is the one person on earth who cannot encounter the poem cold. In my scoring notes, the errors that survive an author's rereads cluster into a short, predictable list:
- Doubled or missing small words: the, a, of, to
- Homophone swaps: their for there, its for it's
- A word repeated from the title without intention
- Tense or pronoun drift between stanzas
- Punctuation that changed halfway through revision and never got reconciled
None of these are talent problems. All of them are attention problems, and attention is exactly what a tired author no longer has.
A checklist beats raw attention because it does not depend on freshness. It converts vigilance, which drains by the minute, into procedure, which does not. Pilots do not run checklists because they forget how to fly. They run them because competence and blindness live in the same brain, and only one of them talks.
The 10-Point Self Editing Checklist
Run these in order. Each step takes one to five minutes. The full pass takes under an hour, which is a fair price for a poem you may have carried around for years.
- Read it aloud, standing up. Not in your head, not muttered at your desk. Standing changes your breath, and breath is where clunky rhythm hides. Every place you stumble or run out of air is a note from your own body telling you the line is wrong. Mark the stumble, keep reading, fix it after.
- Run the double-word scan. Find your poem's five strongest words and search for each one. If "salt" appears in the title and again in the last line, that repetition must be a decision. Accidental repetition tells a reader the poet stopped listening to their own poem, and readers can feel it even when they cannot name it.
- Audit every adjective. Circle them all. Each one must carry information the noun cannot hold alone. "Cold snow" is dead weight; "borrowed snow" is a poem starting to happen. Cut half your adjectives and read the draft again. In my experience the poem misses maybe one of them.
- Interrogate your verbs. Anywhere you wrote "was walking", try "walked". Anywhere you leaned on "is" or "are", check whether a real verb is hiding underneath the sentence. Verbs are the muscles of a line. Forms of "to be" are the couch the muscles are lying on.
- Try the first-stanza deletion test. Cover stanza one and read the poem without it. In roughly half the contest drafts I score, the poem actually begins at stanza two, and the opening stanza is the poet clearing their throat in public. If the poem survives the cut, the cut was overdue.
- Read the line-break column. Cover everything except the final word of each line, then read straight down that column. Line endings collect free emphasis whether you want them to or not, so those words should deserve the spotlight. A column that reads "the, of, was, and" means your breaks are fighting your poem. A working feel for enjambment turns this step from a chore into a pleasure.
- Purge the borrowed language. Hunt down every phrase you have read somewhere before: shattered dreams, heavy heart, light in the darkness, time stood still. You did not write those. You quoted the culture. Replace each one with what you actually saw, heard, or held, even if the replacement is plainer. Plain and true beats polished and secondhand every single time.
- Run the tense and pronoun audit. Choose a tense and a point of view on purpose, then verify every line honors the choice. Drifting from past to present mid-poem can be a powerful move, but only when the drift is the point. The same goes for a "you" that quietly becomes an "I". Judges forgive bold choices and punish sloppy ones, and we can always tell the difference.
- Weigh the title. A title is not a label, it is the first line you get for free. "Untitled" and "A Poem About My Mother" spend that gift on nothing. Ask what the title adds that the poem does not already say. The best titles start the poem before the poem starts.
- Take the 48-hour cold read. Put the draft away for two full days, then read it once, fast, like a stranger scrolling. Whatever bothers you in that single cold pass is what will bother every editor and judge who sees it. Trust that flinch. It is the closest you will ever get to reading your own poem for the first time.
A Before and After From My Own Notebook
Checklists sound abstract until you watch one work. Here is a stanza from an old draft of mine, exactly as it stood before a full pass:
The rain was falling softly on the ground / and I was thinking about my father's hands / and all the sadness that I felt inside.
Step one caught the limp rhythm. Step three flagged "softly". Step four flagged "was falling" and "was thinking". Step seven flagged "sadness that I felt inside", which is not an image but a diary entry wearing a poem's clothes. After the pass:
Rain stitched the yard to the sky. / My father's hands. The fence he never finished.
Nothing in the second version announces sadness, and that is why it lands. The unfinished fence does the feeling for me. Every move in that revision came off the checklist, not from inspiration. Inspiration wrote the bad version. Procedure found the good one.
The Entry That Taught Me Point Seven
Two winters ago I scored a grief poem with a middle section I still think about: the poet described folding a dead brother's shirts and finding a cinema stub in a pocket, dated three days after the funeral, for a film he must have booked in advance. Devastating. Specific. True in the way only detail can be true. Then the final stanza arrived and told me he had "a heart of gold" and was "gone too soon" to "a better place". Three borrowed phrases in four lines, and the poem's spell broke like a cheap plate.
That entry did not place, and the margin was exactly those four lines. The poet who found the cinema stub could obviously write. They just never ran the purge, never asked which of their phrases they had actually made. If grief is your subject, the standard is higher, not lower, because the shelf of secondhand grief language is the fullest shelf in the store. Our notes on grief poems come back to this constantly: the reader cries at the stub, never at the slogan.
What a Checklist Cannot Do
I want to be honest about the limits, because checklist culture can curdle into superstition. No list will give your poem a reason to exist. If the draft has nothing at stake, ten passes will produce a very clean poem about nothing, and clean nothing still scores like nothing. The checklist's real job is noise removal. It clears away the typos, the borrowed phrases, and the limp verbs so that whatever signal your poem carries can be heard at full volume.
Revision does not fix the poem you wrote. It uncovers the poem you meant.
That distinction matters. Editors who treat revision as repair end up sanding their drafts smooth and featureless. Editors who treat it as excavation keep digging until the strange, specific thing they meant to say is standing in the open air. The list above is a set of shovels. You still have to want to find something.
Run It Tonight, Then Let It Go
Here is the last piece of judge's advice, and it is the one poets resist most: a checklist is also a finish line. Once a draft has survived all ten points, stop. Endless revision past that point is usually fear wearing a work ethic. Send the poem somewhere it will be read seriously. Writory's monthly contest is one honest option, partly because every entrant receives a score breakdown across creativity, emotion, structure, language, and theme, so even a poem that does not win comes back to you with a map. You can see how the scoring works and decide if your newly checked draft is ready for strangers.
And if it is not ready, good. Now you own a repeatable way to close the gap, tonight, without waiting for a muse, a mentor, or a mood. There are more habits like this in our writing tips library, but this list is the one I would tattoo somewhere visible. Talent writes the draft. The checklist gets it out the door alive.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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