Is It Editing or Revising?

Sometimes, even the best students and writers out there need a little help making sure that the project they are completing is perfect. After all, we've all had one, a horrendously difficult professor who takes off extra points for misplaced commas and too many spaces after a period. They're the kind of instructors who take your pretty good term paper and decide that it is really not very good at all.

In almost every case, when it comes time to make that term paper perfect, it's a good idea to have someone else look at the paper for you to read what it actually says. As writers, we usually know what we meant to say, so our minds make the words on the page say what we thought. That means it's easy to read over a skipped word, misspelling or a place where we've used a homonym in the place of the right word. It's not that people don't know the difference between right and write. It's that sometimes we write so fast that the wrong word look right.

Some people use the terms editing and revision, the things one needs to do to perfect an essay or term paper, interchangeably, but the truth of the matter is that they are very different things. When a paper needs editing, it is already solidly written, flows logically from one point to the next and covers all the material. The person editing need only check for grammar, punctuation, and meticulous formatting details.

A revision is a much more extensive process. When a paper is in need of revision, it might be completely out of order, for instance. During the revision process, the writer examining your paper will find all the salient points you made and then move them to flow logically from an introduction to a conclusion. While revising, you, or your revision assistant, may remove entire passages that don't belong as part of the term paper and may make changes to the writing. On occasion, during the revision process you will even add more information, though usually this is gleaned from sources that are already present.

Knowing whether your term paper simply needs editing or if it needs a full revision can be tricky. To figure it out, start by asking yourself, "If I turned this in right now, would the professor say that it was sloppy or would he say that I missed the point?" If you missed the point, you need to think revision, not editing.

To start the revising process, consider making a brief outline of the project including the major points. If you can read a paragraph of your project and not know what the point of the paragraph is, it probably needs revision. If your term paper makes sense, but it looks like a combination of an email to a friend and test sent late at night, you probably need an editor. The best way to edit, is to read the paper backwards, starting with the last paragraph. This often will help you pick out little mistakes that you missed the first time. And never forget to run the spellchecker. It's not always right, but if it gives you a squiggly line, you know it's something you should double check.