Revising and editing are the two tasks you undertake to significantly improve your essay at the last stage of your writing process. You may feel accomplished when you finish your first draft. However, even experienced writers need to improve their drafts and often rely on peers during revising and editing. Consider writing as a process. The more you invest your time in revising and editing an early draft, the better your writing is improved. In that way, you can learn how to be a good writer.

Purpose of Revising and Editing

Revising and editing allow you to examine two important aspects of your writing separately so that you can give each task your undivided attention.

• When you revise, you take a second look at your ideas. You might add, cut, move, or change information in order to make your ideas clearer, more accurate, more interesting, or more convincing.
• When you edit, you take a second look at how you expressed your ideas. You add or change words. You fix any problems in grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure. You improve your writing style. You make your essay into a polished, mature piece of writing, the end product of your best efforts.

The focus of this chapter is editing, while briefly covering how to revise. Although you might think editing and proofreading isn’t necessary since you were fairly careful when you were writing, the truth is that even the very brightest people and best writers make mistakes when they write. One of the main reasons that you are likely to make mistakes is that your mind and fingers are not always moving along at the same speed nor are they necessarily in sync. Therefore, what ends up on the page isn’t always exactly what you intended. A second reason is that, as you make changes and adjustments, you might not totally match up the original parts and revised parts. Finally, a third key reason for proofreading is because you likely have errors you typically make, and proofreading gives you a chance to correct those errors.

Revision for Unity and Coherence

When a piece of writing has unity, all the ideas in each paragraph and in the entire essay clearly belong and are arranged in an order that makes logical sense. When the writing has coherence, the ideas flow smoothly. The wording clearly indicates how one idea leads to another within a paragraph and from paragraph to paragraph. Let’s take the following steps to revise your writing.

Step 1. Read Aloud

To start proofreading, read your writing aloud. Then, you will find problems with unity and conference. Listen for the clarity and flow of your ideas. Identify places where you find yourself confused, and write a note to yourself about possible fixes.

Step 2. Read Closely

Once you read your draft aloud and have a note about the parts that you find confusing and unclear, read it closely. It can be very easy to accidentally overlook an issue if you are only reading the essay in one way. You can also try to shift your start point, which means that you start reading over your essay in the middle of the essay rather than always from the beginning. Reading an essay out of order can help your mind experience each part of the essay in a new way, keeping you from becoming tired during intensive close reading. Like in Step 1, write a note about places that you find unclear and in need of improvement.

Step 3. Create and Reinforce Unity

Sometimes you get caught up in the moment and cannot resist a good digression. Even though you might enjoy such detours when you chat with friends, unplanned digressions usually harm a piece of writing. When you read your draft, don’t hesitate to cut off unnecessary sentences that mar your writing’s unity.

Step 4. Create 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. Check “Common Transitional Words and Phrases.”

Step 5. Clarify Your Main Point

Once you check the unity of your writing, consider how to clarify your main point, which can be also your thesis statement in an essay, by paraphrasing a central argument. Your main idea of an essay or even of a paragraph may not look strong enough to hold the entire piece under one clear idea after you remove unnecessary sentences/phrases and create coherence among sentences/paragraphs.

Continue Reading: 14.2 Editing for Formality and Clarity