"What's the difference? Revision refers to substantial changing of a text, for example, re-organizing ideas and paragraphs, providing additional examples or information, rewriting a conclusion for clarity, and so forth. Editing, on the other hand, refers to correcting mistakes in spelling, grammar, punctuation, and so on."
REVISION CHECKLIST Ask the following questions of your essay as you revise your draft: Is your title interesting and descriptive of your contents?
Will your opening sentence attract the reader’s attention? If not, how can you improve it? Will your readers learn something interesting from your essay?
Have you organized your essay in logically?
Do you support your main idea with examples?
Does all the writing relate to your main idea? Look for unnecessary information and edit it out.
Do you use effective transitions to connect your details and examples so that your readers can follow your writing?
Does the conclusion bring your essay to a satisfying close? Does it leave the reader something to think about?
Did you choose your tone and diction carefully? Did you check for accurate use of vocabulary?
Do you use a variety of sentence structures and length in order to make your writing interesting?
Have you checked your punctuation?
Have you checked your grammar, especially subject-verb agreement, verb tenses, and proper noun plurals?
How happy are you with your essay? Do you think readers will enjoy reading it?
Read Backwards
This is a common technique used by writers: read your paper backwards.
We often become "blind" to our own mistakes, seeing the correct word or grammar on the page when it really isn't there. In order to break this pattern you can read your writing backwards, phrase by phrase, or word by word. This will help you see your text in a new way.
I usually upload my writing to my blog and proofread it. Reading what I've written on a web page makes me alert about mistakes. Printing out the text is good for a person with aged eyes like me to find punctuation errors. I tried backwards-reading for the first time. I liked it. While I was doing this, I noticed spelling mistakes and an inappropriate usage of a preposition. The technique to check the logical order was new to me and it was also useful. It helped me have a fresh look at one body paragraph of my final project. Oh, and I've learned to turn on the free grammar & spelling checker in this course!
Related to: Week 5 / Your ideas
This post is visible to everyone.
5 responses
- A good practice, I might test it.
- Great one.posted 6 days ago by gobizen7e38
- Thank you for your response, Nsept7, and thank you for your compliment, gobizen7e38. I learned all the ideas I wrote above in this course except for the first one. This course was informative, and peer comments helped me a lot. Their corrections improved me. Good comments were heart-warming. I was encouraged by them a lot. I thank both types of comments and I must thank edX and Moocs.posted 3 days ago by NorikoSasaki
