Need to quickly revise your paper? Can't decide what to look for? Unsure of your skills? If so, you definitely need COPS to help fix your problems.

COPS is an acronym that can help you remember key editing and revising categories. This acronym is helpful if you are looking at small amounts of text as well. It's very useful for business documents, articles, memos, reports, and forms.

COPS stands for Capitalization, Organization, Punctuation, and Spelling.

Capitalization includes looking at the beginning of each line of text in your document. In traditional writing, this would focus on the first letter of a sentence. Capitalization must also be applied to proper nouns throughout the text. Specific names of persons, places, objects, and ideas must be capitalized.

Organization refers to checking on the orderly structure of the document. For prose (fiction and non-fiction) this would include paragraphs, sub-headings, chapters, as well as beginning-middle-ends of ideas. For poetry and drama this would include stanzas and lines, scenes, acts, etc. As important is the natural development of logic or thought from the beginning foundations to the culminating end of the document.

Punctuation focuses on the main endings of sentences as well as apostrophes, colons and semi-colons, dashes, and quotation marks. Depending on your perspective and use, brackets, parentheses, and characters may be included here, or with organization.

Spelling is obvious in its focus. If you aren't sure of a word, you must look it up. Especially with spelling, but likewise with the other elements of COPS, it is very useful to have another person check your text. Many times the human mind glosses over its own mistakes to create a meaningful whole. Another person will be able to see right through this to the glaring mistakes in your text.

The next time you have a deadline and are feeling stressed out about how to edit, let COPS solve your problems.

Leyton Roberts
Main website: http://sites.google.com/site/editinghelpsite/
Main blog: http://editinghelpsite.blogspot.com/

I am a Professional Educator and English teacher in Northern Virginia. I offer editing and proofreading services at below market rates, specifically to students and small businesses. There are a number of Freebies on the site including gadgets, useful links, and my articles.