The Pre-Submission Editing Checklist
Quick answer: A pre-submission editing checklist for poets: 12 passes every poem should survive before a contest entry, from opening lines to formatting and titles.
Judges and editors will tell you, privately and with some weariness, that a large share of the entries they read were never edited at all. Not edited badly: not edited. First drafts with the paint still wet, sent in the glow of having finished, carrying typos in line two and an ending that arrives a stanza after the poem actually ended. These entries are not beaten by genius. They are beaten by poems whose writers did one more honest hour of work. That hour is the cheapest competitive advantage in poetry, and this page is a map of it.
What follows is a 12-point pass a poem should survive before it goes anywhere near a submit button. It is deliberately mechanical, because inspiration got you the draft and inspiration is a poor proofreader. Run the points in order, in at least two sittings with rest between them, and expect most poems to fail somewhere the first time through. That is the checklist doing its job: better your desk catches the weak line than a judge does.
The straight answer
Editing for submission is three distinct jobs done in sequence: structural (is this the right poem, in the right order, ending at the right moment), line-level (does every line, image and word earn its place), and mechanical (spelling, punctuation, formatting, guideline compliance). Poets skip to the third job because it is easiest, then wonder why clean poems keep losing. Work top down. There is no point polishing a stanza the poem does not need.
One rule governs everything: never edit on the day you drafted. The draft glow lasts roughly 24 hours and makes every line look inevitable. Distance is not a luxury for professionals, it is the mechanism by which you get to read your poem as a stranger, and the stranger is who the judge will be.
The 12-point pass
Here is the full checklist. Each point is a separate small pass through the poem, and the discipline of taking them one at a time is what makes weak spots visible. Together they take about an hour for a page-length poem, spread across two or three sittings.
The twelve points:
Openings and endings deserve double time
Points two and three earn a section of their own because contests are won and lost at the edges of poems. A judge with two hundred entries decides within a few lines whether to lean in, so an opening that clears its throat, sets scenery for a stanza, or begins with the weather has spent its one chance on preamble. Strong openings tend to start inside the situation: a specific image, a voice already speaking, a claim that demands the next line.
Endings fail in the opposite direction: they keep going. Drafts very often contain their true ending two or three lines before the final full stop, followed by a small paragraph of explanation, as if the poet feared the reader missed it. Find the line with the most charge near the end and try cutting everything after it. The poem will feel abrupt to you and inevitable to a stranger, and the stranger is right.
The cooling-off period
Between drafting and running this checklist, the poem needs to rest, and so do you. Two days is a minimum; a week is better. During the rest, do not peek and do not tinker. When you return, print the poem or change its font before rereading, because visual novelty tricks the brain out of reciting the remembered version and into actually reading the words on the page. Errors and dead lines that were invisible on Tuesday will be embarrassing by Sunday, which is the entire value of waiting.
If a deadline makes a full rest impossible, manufacture distance: read the poem aloud to another person, or record yourself reading it and listen back. Both force the poem through a channel your composing brain does not control. But note the deeper lesson for next time: the deadline did not arrive suddenly. Drafting earlier is an editing technique.
Formatting and guideline compliance
Mechanical compliance is the least poetic point on the list and the one that disqualifies otherwise strong entries outright. Contests that judge anonymously will bin poems with names in the file; contests with line limits will bin poems one line over; some are strict about file formats, font sizes or one-poem-per-entry rules. None of this is negotiable from your side, so make guideline rereading the literal last step before submission, after all creative edits are done, in case an edit changed the line count.
Where contests publish judging criteria, read your poem against them once as a final pass. If entries are scored on creativity, emotion, structure, language and theme, as they are in Writory's monthly contest, walk through those five words with your poem in hand and ask where it is thinnest. This is not writing to a rubric; the poem is already written. It is checking your work against the reader it will actually meet.
Traps and time-wasters
The first trap is infinite polishing, the mirror image of not editing: poems held back for a fifteenth revision that no longer improves anything, only delays the verdict. When two consecutive editing sessions produce only swaps you reverse next session, the poem is done; send it. The second trap is outsourcing judgement to tools: spellcheckers are useful servants and terrible poets, and grammar software will confidently flatten the deliberate fragment your poem depends on. The third is editing by committee, where feedback from five friends sands the poem into agreeable mush. One or two trusted readers beats a chorus.
Underneath all three traps is the same fear, that the poem will be judged. It will. The checklist cannot remove that; it can only guarantee the judgement lands on your best available version.
A realistic first step this week
Take one finished poem you were planning to submit and run it through all twelve points across two sittings this week, with at least a day between them. Keep the earlier version so you can compare. Most poets find the exercise pays for itself on point two or three alone, when the real opening or the real ending surfaces. Then submit the survivor somewhere before the week is out, because a checklist is only craft when it ends in an envelope.
What poets can take from this
- Never edit on drafting day; the glow hides everything.
- Read aloud and treat every stumble as a repair ticket.
- Try cutting your first two lines and your last two; drafts hide the real poem inside padding.
- Proofread backwards to defeat your brain's autocorrect.
- Reread the guidelines as the final step, after all edits, in case line counts changed.
- Stop revising when consecutive sessions only reverse each other's changes.
Try it yourself
Take any old draft, delete its first stanza and last stanza, and write a new poem out of what remains, letting the amputation choose a sharper subject.
Questions
How many times should I edit a poem before submitting it?
Count passes, not perfection. A poem that has survived a structural pass, a line-level pass and a mechanical proofread, with resting time between drafting and editing, is submission-ready. If further sessions only produce changes you later reverse, the poem is done.
What do contest judges notice first in a poem?
The title and the opening lines, because they meet the poem before anything else, and then mechanical care, because typos in line two signal an unedited entry. A confident opening and a clean page buy your poem the patient reading its middle deserves.
Should I let someone else read my poem before I submit it?
One or two trusted readers help enormously, especially for spotting confusion you are too close to see. Ask them where they stumbled or drifted rather than whether they liked it. Avoid large feedback groups before a deadline; too many voices flatten a poem's character.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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