Even after a draft is written, you are still not quite finished. The fourth step
Even after a draft is written, you are still not quite finished. The fourth step of the process is revising and the fifth step is editing. Revising and editing are not the same thing, and it is best to accomplish revision and editing as two separate, distinct steps.
When you revise, you are evaluating and improving, if necessary, the way your whole essay or individual paragraphs are organized or developed. You will need to consider completeness, cohesiveness, and coherence when revising your work.
When you edit your writing, you proofread, or search for errors at the sentence and word levels. In other words, you comb through the paper carefully, searching for grammatical and spelling errors and making adjustments to sentences to improve your overall style. Editing involves making these necessary corrections. After locating and fixing any errors, you prepare your final draft for submission.
Revising vs. Editing
Take a moment and think about the word revision. Notice that it includes the prefix re-, meaning “back or again,” and the root word –vision, which means revision literally means “to look at again.” Once you have written an essay, you need to look at it again to make sure you have successfully explained your main idea to your readers.
Revising and editing are different steps. When you revise a paragraph, you are looking for and then correcting paragraph-level problems. In other words, you are evaluating and improving, if necessary, the way your whole paragraph is organized or developed. Editing involves examining the paragraph at the sentence and word levels and correcting errors in sentence construction, grammar, word choice, and spelling.
It is best to accomplish revision and editing as two separate, distinct steps, for each process involves looking at different aspects of each paragraph.
Criteria for Revision
To revise a paragraph, you will need to evaluate it for the three Cs: completeness, cohesiveness, and coherence.
- Completeness. When you are examining a paragraph to make sure it is complete, or adequately developed, you are evaluating its layers of development. A layer of development provides more specific information about a general idea in the sentence that came before it. It anticipates and answers readers’ questions about more general statements, so it increases their understanding. To determine whether you have provided enough development, consider the following techniques.
- Use different colors of highlighter markers to identify the layers in your paragraph. Use one color to highlight the topic sentence, which is the most general sentence in the paragraph. Use another color to highlight the second sentence, which should develop the first sentence. If the third sentence develops the second sentence, use yet another color to highlight it. If the third sentence develops the first sentence, highlight it with the same color you used for the second sentence. Follow this same procedure for all sentences in the paragraph. Then, afte