The single most useful editorial habit I have learned in fifteen years of this work is to read everything aloud, at speaking pace, before I send it. I wish I had a more sophisticated piece of advice. I do not.
You cannot hide a stiff sentence from your own voice. You cannot fake a rhythm. You cannot get away with a clause that should have been a sentence — your breath gives you away. Every junior writer in our studio is taught this in the first week, and most of them resist it for about a month, and then one of them reads aloud a paragraph that has been sitting on a shared doc for three days, and the whole studio winces in unison, and the lesson sticks.
Most teams skip this step because it feels embarrassing. Reading your own copy aloud, in an office, with colleagues nearby, is mildly humiliating the first dozen times. After that, it becomes the thing you cannot stop doing. There is a particular kind of writer who has internalised the habit so thoroughly that they read aloud silently — lips moving — at their desk. We have three of those at BrandingNarrative. They are the best editors in the studio.