2.6 Revising and Editing

This section defines revising and editing and provides guidelines for successful final deliverables.

What is Revising?

Revising a document means that you look at the document as a whole, or “higher- order concerns …[including] purpose, content, and structure” (Last et al., 2022). You need to make significant changes to organization by reordering the sections or paragraphs for logic, add content to more fully explain concepts, or delete unnecessary content which could cause confusion and purpose issues.

Most students seem to think that both revising and editing are quick endeavors, but they are not.  You should spend significant time on your document after peer review, and usability testing, to make sure that it is polished and professional, so leave yourself at least a week.  It is good practice to give yourself time to put your document away and come back to it with fresh eyes after a few days.

As you revise, enable track changes or use Google Docs which has a revision history. This ensures that you don’t lose content.  Sometimes when you revise, you may accidentally cut and delete some content that you can use in a different section of your tutorial, so save all of your writing.

The first step after the peer review is to read what your reviewer said about your draft and focus on the recommendations for improvement as well as any negatives that they point out.

The second step is to read your document carefully while thoughtfully considering your peer feedback.  You don’t always have to implement the changes that the review recommends, but you should think from your audience’s perspective and make changes that will enhance the readability and usability of your document.  As Redish (2012) states, “you may have thought you were making sense but, on reading it, realize that others may not understand what you mean” (p. 290).

Research also shows that reading your document out loud may help you identify phrasing or logic issues (Gales, 2020; Redish, 2012), and you can revise as you listen to your document. This doesn’t always work for non-native English speakers, however.

As you are revising your sections, subsections, and paragraphs, also check your formatting and document design.  Remember that your choices need to be consistent throughout the document.

What is Editing?

Editing a document means that you look at text granularly at a sentence or phrase level, which is considered a “lower-order concern” to “polish…” the document (Last et al., 2022).  In professional areas, publications employ people whose only job is to edit since analyzing sentence level clarity takes significant time, effort, and skill.

Since you won’t have access to an editor, you need to become your own editor by carefully reading each sentence to determine grammatical correctness, plain language and specific word and phrase choices, and appropriate use of punctuation.  As an editor, you need use the fewest words possible to state what you mean, so the audience will easily understand your text.

There are different types of editing, including managerial, substantive, copy, and proofreading (Barker, 2002), but this section will focus on copy editing although you should also proofread. Copy editing is when you ensure readability, clarity, and consistency of sentences and grammar correctness (Barker, 2022). Proofreading reviews format consistency, links, and spelling.

At this stage, you want to check source information, citations, reference entries, footnotes, and hyperlinks to make sure they are correct (Tebeaux & Dragga, 2018).

Additionally, make sure you carefully review the Writing Style chapter of this tutorial as you edit your document, but here are some guidelines you should follow: