18 Revising, Editing, and Proofreading Your Work
When you write, it’s important to make sure your work is clear, correct, and well-organized. This is where revising, editing, and proofreading are important. These steps help you improve your writing and make it the best it can be. These steps all happen after you have the first draft of your writing. They help you improve the first draft so your writing is as strong as possible. See the chapter on The Writing Process for more information about drafts.
Why These Steps are Important
- Revising helps you organize your ideas and make your writing more interesting.
- Editing makes sure your writing is clear and easy to understand.
- Proofreading ensures your writing is free of small mistakes that can distract readers.
Revising
Revising comes from the same root word as vision. The prefix re- means to do something again. So you can guess that to revise something means to look at it again. You check to see if your ideas are clear and well-organized. You might add, remove, or move parts of your text to make your writing better. This is the first step you take after you submit a first draft of your essay.
The goal of revising is to make any big changes to your paper before you start working on the small stuff like word choice and grammar.
Examples of Revising
- Adding details: “I went to the park” could be revised to “I went to the park and enjoyed a picnic under the shady oak trees.”
- Removing unnecessary parts: “The big, large, huge dog” can be revised to “The large dog.”
- Reorganizing: Moving a sentence or paragraph to a different place to improve the flow.
Editing
Editing is the next step in the writing process. Editing focuses on improving the language and style of your writing. It’s important to focus on how your writing sounds and how clear your words are. When you edit your paper, you start looking at some of the smaller things, like word choice. Here are some things to think about when you begin editing:
- Do you have good transition words in your paper?
- Is your language clear and specific?
- Do you have a variety of sentence types so your writing flows and sounds good if it is read aloud?
After you have clear language, good word choice, and sentence variety, you can start paying attention to grammar. Some common grammar mistakes you might want to check for include:
- Verb tenses: Do you use the correct verb tense for the time you are writing about?
- Subject-verb agreement: Do your subjects and verbs match? For example, do you say he/she/it does and I/you/we/they do?
- Parts of speech: Are you using the correct parts of speech? For example, are you using beauty as a noun, beautiful as an adjective, and beautifully as an adverb?
- Sentence structure: Do all of your sentences have a subject and a verb? Do your compound sentences have a comma and coordinating conjunction? Do your complex sentences include a subordinating conjunction and the correct punctuation?
Proofreading
Proofreading is the final step. You carefully check your writing for any small mistakes, like typos (things you typed incorrectly) or missing words. This step ensures your writing is polished and ready to share.
Examples of Proofreading
- Typos: Correcting “teh” to “the.”
- Missing words: Adding “to” in “I want go the store” to make it “I want to go to the store.”
- Formatting errors: Making sure your paragraphs are indented correctly.
- Capitalization, punctuation, and spacing: Making sure you have correct capital letters, punctuation, and spaces between words or around punctuation marks.
Strategies for Revising, Editing, and Proofreading
- Take a Break: After writing, take a break before revising. This helps you see your work with fresh eyes.
- Read Aloud: Reading your work aloud can help you catch errors and see if your writing flows well.
- Use Tools: Use grammar and spell check tools, but don’t rely on them completely.
- Peer Review: Ask a classmate to read your work and give feedback.
- Checklist: Create a checklist of common errors to look for while proofreading.
Correct the Paragraph
The paragraph below has 15 mistakes. Can you find and fix them all?
| on a bright summer day, the sun shine brightly over the rolling hills. Birds was singing in the tree, and the river flow gently through the valley. flowers of all colors blooms along the river. The sky were a deep blue, dotted with fluffy white cloud. Children plays near the water, their laughters filling the air. the warm breeze carry the smell of fresh grass and wildflowers. Butterflies was flying from flower to flower. it was a perfect day for a picnic, and many families was enjoying the lovely weather. Everyone seem happy and relax, enjoying the beauty of nature. |
