Chapter 5: The Writing Process 4: Editing
Learning Objectives
1. Identify and correct spelling errors in draft documents.
2. Plan, write, revise, and edit short documents and messages that are organized, complete, and tailored to specific audiences.
i. Use a systematic approach to edit, revise, and proofread.
ii. Edit and proofread documents to eliminate errors.
iii. Revise documents to improve clarity, correctness, and coherence.
The very last target for proofreading as you finalize your draft for submission is mechanics. In English writing, mechanics relates to typographic style such as the choice between UPPERCASE and lowercase letters, italics or boldface type and plain style, as well as using figures (e.g., 1, 2, 3) or written out numbers (e.g., one, two, three). Professionals follow stylistic conventions for mechanics much like they do punctuation rules. If you don’t know these conventions, making them up as you go along may produce unprofessional-looking documents. Consider the following as your guide for how to get your writing mechanics right.
5.5.1: Capitalizing
One of the worst mistakes you can make in a high-priority document like a cover letter is a glaring capitalization error such as not capitalizing the first letter in a sentence or writing “im” or “ive” instead of “I am” or “I have.” These errors are fine when texting your friends. To a hiring manager, however, the red flags they raise concerning the literacy, work ethic, and even maturity of the applicant might land that application in the shredder. At the other typographic extreme, those who use all-caps for anything other than abbreviations, as in “SEND ME THAT REPORT RIGHT NOW,” look emotionally unstable. In normal writing, we use conventional combinations of capitals and lowercase letters meaningfully to guide our readers through our sentences. Let’s take a closer look at when to capitalize and when not to capitalize letters.
<IP_ADDRESS>: What to Capitalize
You can’t go wrong if you capitalize in the following situations:
- First letter of the first word of a:
- Sentence; e.g. These pretzels are making me thirsty.
- Full-sentence quotation even if it appears after a signal phrase; e.g., A great American humourist put it best when he said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness” (Twain, 1869, p. 333).
- Rule following a colon in a sentence; e.g., My mother taught me the golden rule: Treat others the way you’d like to be treated yourself
- Point in a bullet-point or numbered list regardless of whether it’s a full sentence or just a noun phrase, as in this list
- The first-person personal pronoun “I”
- Major words in titles, including the first letter of the first word no matter what it is, nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, but not short prepositions such as in, of, on, or to, nor coordinating conjunctions such as and, but, for, or so, unless they’re the first word (see Table <IP_ADDRESS> below for several example titles)
- The first lette