Editing & Revising

Introduction

Revising and editing are the two tasks you undertake to significantly improve your essay. Both are very important elements of the writing process.

You may think that a completed first draft means little improvement is needed. However, even experienced writers need to improve their drafts and rely on peers during revising and editing. In the case of students, they have themselves, their classmates, campus tutors, friends and/or family members, and the instructor to help them with their correcting process.

You may know that athletes miss catches, fumble balls, or overshoot goals. Dancers forget steps, turn too slowly, or miss beats. For both athletes and dancers, the more they practice, the stronger their performance will become. Web designers seek better images, a more clever design, or a more appealing background for their web pages. Writing has the same capacity to profit from improvement and revision.

Warm-Up Activity

Scroll through the two-slide slideshow below to review the unmarked and marked writing samples:

Answer the following:

1. What kinds of changes do you see? Explain.

   • What are these changes doing (name the errors/suggestions)?

2. Are all of the changes correcting "errors" or something else besides things that are just incorrect English? Explain.

Introduction to Editing & Revision

Many times, people use the words "edit" and "revise" interchangeably. However, they describe different actions to help improve something, and in relation to our class, that something is your writing. One describes the correction of errors, and the other describes the improvement of a product.

• Edit: Finding errors in punctuation, grammar, and spelling and eliminating unnecessary words or phrases

• Revise: Changing the content of your essay. Determine areas where you could add, delete, or move text to make your content more effective.

What to Look-Out For

Review the following information to help guide you through editing and revising.

Questions to Ask

Here are some questions to ask yourself to help edit and revise your papers:

• Did you answer the prompt?

• Did you utilize the checklist provided in Academic Essay Structure & Creation?

• Look-out for the following areas of improvement:

  • Was there enough evidence to support the thesis and topic sentences?

  • Does everything make sense as a cohesive essay?

  • Was it structured and formatted correctly according to academic essay and MLA guidelines?

• Edit and revise the following within your draft:

  • Are the sentences written grammatically correct and with using correct punctuation?

  • Are there opportunities for improved syntax and word usage?

  • Are there areas that need further explaining and/or does not answer the prompt?

Resources

Watch this video to discover how to improve a paper:

The document below provides a nice checklist for editing papers:

Creating Unity

Sometimes writers get caught up in the moment and cannot resist a good digression (resembling a game of "telephone"). Even though you might enjoy such detours when you chat with friends, unplanned digressions usually harm a piece of writing.

Tip: When you reread your writing to find revisions to make, look for each type of problem in a separate sweep. Read it straight through once to locate any problems with unity. Read it straight through a second time to find problems with coherence. You may follow this same practice during many stages of the writing process.

Creating Coherence

Careful writers use transitions to clarify how the ideas in their sentences and paragraphs are related. These words and phrases help the writing flow smoothly. Adding transitions is not the only way to improve coherence, but they are often useful and give a mature feel to your essays. "Common Transitional Words and Phrases" groups many common transitions according to their purpose.

Being Clear and Concise

Some writers are very methodical and painstaking when they write a first draft. Other writers unleash a lot of words in order to get out all that they feel they need to say. Do either of these composing styles match your style? Or is your composing style somewhere in between? No matter which description best fits you, the first draft of almost every piece of writing, no matter its author, can be made clearer and more concise.

If you have a tendency to write too much, you will need to look for unnecessary words. If you have a tendency to be vague or imprecise in your wording, you will need to find specific words to replace any overly general language.

Identifying Wordiness

Sometimes writers use too many words when fewer words will appeal more to their audience and better fit their purpose. Here are some common examples of wordiness to look for in your draft. Eliminating wordiness helps all readers because it makes your ideas clear, direct, and straightforward.

Sentences that begin with There is or There are

• Wordy: There are two major experiments that the Biology Department sponsors.

• Revised: The Biology Department sponsors two major experiments.

Sentences with unnecessary modifiers

• Wordy: Two extremely famous and well-known consumer advocates spoke eloquently in favor of the proposed important legislation.

• Revised: Two well-known consumer advocates spoke in favor of the proposed legislation.

Sentences with deadwood phrases that add little to the meaning. Be careful when you use phrases such as in terms of, with a mind to, on the subject of, as to whether or not, more or less, as far as…is concerned, and similar expressions. You can usually find a more straightforward way to state your point.

• Wordy: As a world leader in the field of green technology, the company plans to focus its efforts in the area of geothermal energy.

• Revised: As a world leader in green technology, the company plans to focus on geothermal energy.

Sentences in the passive voice or with forms of the verb to be (are, were, is, am, will, etc.). Sentences with passive-voice verbs often create confusion because the subject of the sentence does not perform an action. Sentences are clearer when the subject of the sentence performs the action and is followed by a strong verb. Use strong, active-voice verbs in place of forms of to be, which can lead to wordiness.

• Wordy: It might perhaps be said that using a GPS device is something that is a benefit to drivers who have a poor sense of direction.

• Revised: Using a GPS device benefits drivers who have a poor sense of direction.

Sentences with constructions that can be shortened.

• Wordy: My over-sixty uncle bought an e-book reader, and his wife bought an e-book reader, too.

• Revised: My over-sixty uncle and his wife both bought e-book readers.

Choosing Specific, Appropriate Words

Most college essays should be written in formal English suitable for an academic situation unless otherwise indicated by your prompt who the audience should be.

Follow these principles to be sure that your word choice is appropriate for an academic audience:

• Avoid slang. Find alternatives to bummer, kewl, and rad.

• Avoid using "text speech," such as u, r, ur, h8, etc. Spell-out the full word instead: you, are, your, hate, etc.

• Avoid language that is overly casual. Write about “men and women” rather than “girls and guys” unless you are trying to create a specific effect. A formal tone calls for formal language.

• Avoid contractions. Use do not in place of don’t, I am in place of I’m, have not in place of haven’t, and so on. Contractions are considered casual speech.

• Avoid clichés. Overused expressions, such as green with envy, face the music, better late than never, and similar expressions are empty of meaning and may not appeal to your audience.

• Be careful when you use words that sound alike but have different meanings. Some examples are: allusion/illusion, complement/compliment, council/counsel, concurrent/consecutive, founder/flounder, and historic/historical. When in doubt, check a dictionary.

• Choose words with the connotations you want. Choosing a word for its connotations is as important in formal essay writing as it is in all kinds of writing. For instance, compare the positive connotations of the word proud and the negative connotations of arrogant and conceited.

• Use specific words rather than overly general words. Find synonyms for thing, stuff, people, nice, good, bad, interesting, and other vague words. Or use specific details to make your exact meaning clear.

Tip: Remember, the above list of words to avoid are primarily for when you are writing to an academic audience. What are audience situations where the above list could be appropriate? Additionally, when could you use the above list of words to avoid appropriately even with an academic audience? We learn rules for writing to eventually break them since we understand them.

Edit Using the Computer

The computer can lend guidance to help direct you towards issues that might need editing. In the end, though, realize that these are only tools to help your editing, but you will make the ultimate decision about your changes. If you know a suggestion is wrong, you do not need to follow it.

Word Processor

Type your rough draft into your word processor (Microsoft Word, Google Docs, etc.) and use the spell check and grammar check features.

Correct errors the computer identifies, but realize that the computer is not perfect, and it will make mistakes.

Turnitin.com

Turnitin.com is a tool that checks for plagiarism as well as sentence errors. With our class, Turnitin.com is activated for all drafts you submit to assignments (not discussion boards).

• You can check to see if you are in danger of violating academic dishonesty (or committing plagiarism) by writing a paper that uses someone else's words without citing (giving credit) to them. This feature on Turnitin.com is called a similarity report.

• Turnitin.com provides editing guidance called the ETS e-rater feature. This feature checks your sentence errors and provides guidance for correcting them without doing the editing for you.

For more information about the above features, please visit the Turnitin.com student help site.

Tip: Since you know that Turnitin.com is activated for your rough drafts, I would suggest using those assignments to check your similarity report and ETS score. It might take up-to a day to give you this information, but usually takes less. Therefore, try to use it at least a day before a draft is due. That will give you enough time to make any edits that you need and resubmit your draft before it is due.

Gain Some Distance & Repeat the Process

Sometimes, when we are reviewing our own essays, because we are the authors, and we know what we are trying to say, we might gloss-over errors or automatically correct them without actually doing so. We might also think that the arguments and support that we have presented is obvious to others, when it might not be.

Therefore, it is helpful to give yourself distance from the paper in order to gain an objective perspective.

Here are some tips for how to gain an objective perspective on your paper:

• Let your paper rest for at least 24 hours if possible.

• Read your paper aloud slowly—every word—to someone else, if possible.

• Read only what is actually on the page, not what you intended to write but didn’t.

• As you read, insert any information that you think is missing. If you stumble over words, phrases, or sentences while reading aloud or if you have to re-read certain sentences several times, you probably need to rewrite that sentence.

• Find and correct the types of errors that your instructors have marked on past papers.

• Try to read your paper backwards by sentences (not words or letters): Start with the last sentence, then the sentence before that, then the one before that, etc. This will allow you to focus on the structure of your individual sentences without the flow of the paper distracting you, causing you to automatically correct errors.

  • After you are finished with this process, review from the top down again to polish-up the flow of your paper.

It is also helpful to repeat the editing and revising process multiple times. It's like polishing a rock: the first run through the polisher, the rough edges are removed, but each time after, the rock gets more and more smooth--more and more perfect.

Resources and Videos

The videos below supplement the content described in this section of our lesson.

• Difference between editing and revising and ways to remember what to do for each:

• A visualization of someone correcting a paper using a computer:

Key Takeaways

• Revising and editing are the stages of the writing process in which you improve your work before producing a final draft.

• During revising, you add, cut, move, or change information in order to improve content.

• During editing, you take a second look at the words and sentences you used to express your ideas and fix any problems in grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure.

• Remember to budget time for careful editing and proofreading. Use all available resources--including editing checklists, peer editing, and our campus's tutors--to improve your editing skills.