3.5: Editing

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What is Editing?\(^{69}\)

After you feel you’ve revised the draft as much as is needed, editing comes into play. Editing involves a number of small changes in a draft that can make a big difference in the draft’s readability and coherence. Editing can happen at several points in the drafting and revision processes – not just at the end to “fix” things that are wrong.

So, what kinds of things happen when editing? Here are a few:

word changes
minor sentence rearrangement
added transitions
changes for clarity
minor deletions

What Should I Edit For?

The main areas that should be addressed in editing are: Content and Structure.

When editing the content of your writing, it is important to make sure your work has a clear focus or main idea. By asking yourself a few questions, you can avoid incomplete thoughts and/or irrelevant material. The following is a checklist you can use in editing your content:

I have discovered what is important about my topic.
I have expressed the main idea clearly.
I have removed material that is unnecessary, confusing, or irrelevant.

Editing for structure ensures that your ideas are presented in a logical\(^{70}\) order. A single idea\(^{71}\) should be represented in each paragraph. Transitions serve to make the relationships between ideas clear. The following checklist is helpful in editing structure:

My ideas are logically connected to one another.
Each paragraph deals with only one major idea.
I have included appropriate transitional words or phrases.

Questions:

What kinds of things do you need help editing the most when it comes to your own projects and papers?

\(^{69}\)“Basic Writing/Print version.” Wikibooks, The Free Textbook Project. 9 Sep 2008, 16:02 UTC. 11 May 2016, 17:39 <https://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php...&oldid=1273791>. Licensed CC-BY-SA.

\(^{70}\)Please note that sometimes one’s “logical order” might not look the same to everyone.

\(^{71}\)But let’s be real: sometimes, there is more than one idea in each paragraph!