Reviewing a draft well
Squawk gets you most of the way. Knowing how to finish the last bit is what makes it fast.
Squawk's promise is that review takes minutes, not hours. That only holds if you review like an editor instead of a proofreader. The draft starts close. Your job is the last stretch, and it is a small job once you know what to look for.
Read the opening first
Most posts live or die on the first line. Read it the way a stranger scrolling past would. If it does not earn the second line, rewrite just that one line. You will fix more posts faster by sharpening openings than by reworking whole drafts.
The common fixes
Nine times out of ten, a near-miss needs one of these:
- Rewrite the opening so it hooks instead of warms up.
- Cut the weakest line. There is almost always one line doing no work. Delete it.
- Kill the filler. Any sentence that could appear on anyone's post about anything has to go. Be specific or be gone.
- Break the AI cadence. The tells readers now clock as machine-written: every sentence its own paragraph, the "it's not X, it's Y" move, and a tidy rule-of-three bow on the last line. Vary your sentence lengths. Let one paragraph run long.
Check the claim
Does the post assert anything that is not true, or not actually in your material? A draft can sound confident and still be wrong. If a number or a claim is not backed by something real, cut it or fix it. The critique helps here by checking claims against your library.
Where the link goes
On LinkedIn, put links in the first comment, not the body. Body links suppress reach. Set the first comment in the post editor.
Reject or revise
- Revise when the post is on the right topic in roughly the right voice. That is most of them.
- Reject when it is off-topic, or the voice is wrong at the core, not just rough. Do not spend ten minutes saving a draft you would have been faster writing yourself. Reject it and move on.
Make the next one better
Here is the part people skip. When you keep making the same edit, do not just fix this post. Fix the voice. Add the bad phrasing to the expert's anti-patterns, or drop a better sample in. The drafts start closer next time, and your review gets shorter. See Building a voice that sounds like you.
Keep it to minutes
The goal is to edit, not to rewrite. If you find yourself starting over from a blank line, something upstream is off: the voice is thin, or the source material was wrong. Fix that, and reviewing goes back to being a five-minute habit.