revising creative writing

Revising and Editing for Creative Writers

Sean Glatch  |  October 2, 2023  |  Leave a Comment

Want to learn more about revising and editing? Check out our self-paced class  The Successful Novel , which gives you the tools to write, revise, and publish the novel waiting to be written inside you. 

Although the terms revising and editing are often used interchangeably, stylish writers know the difference between revising and editing. When it’s time to shape a first draft into a polished, publishable piece of writing, knowing how to both revise and edit your work is essential.

So, what is revising vs editing? Revising refers to global changes in the text—significant amendments to the work’s structure, intent, themes, content, organization, etc. These are, in other words, macro-level considerations. Editing, by contrast, focuses on changes at the word, sentence, and paragraph level.

These two concepts require different skills and attentions, but both are necessary to create a finished piece of writing. So, let’s dive deeper into revising vs editing, including a revising and editing checklist you can use for any passage of poetry or prose.

First, let’s dive a little deeper into these two essential skills. What is the difference between revising and editing?

Note: the revising and editing resources in this article are geared towards fiction writers. Nonetheless, much of this advice also applies to essayists and nonfiction writers, too.

Revising and Editing: Contents

• The focus of revision
• The focus of editing

Revising Vs Editing: Venn Diagram

• Revision Strategies
• Editing Strategies
• Strategies for Revising and Editing

Revising and Editing Checklist

What is the difference between revising and editing.

Revising and editing are different types of changes you can make to a text. “Revising” is concerned with macro-level considerations: the ideas of a text, and how they are organized and structured as a whole. “Editing,” by contrast, concerns itself with micro-level stylistic considerations, the words and sentences that get those macro-level ideas across.

Revising is concerned with the ideas and structure of the text as a whole; editing is concerned with stylistic considerations, like word choice and sentence structure. 

This revising vs editing chart outlines the different considerations for each concept:

Let’s go a bit deeper into these revising and editing concepts.

Revision strategies focus on:

The text as a whole. If revision focuses on the macro-level concerns for the text, then revision strategies for writing require the writer to think about what the text is accomplishing.

In large part, this means thinking about themes, ideas, arguments, structures, and, if the text is fiction, the elements of fiction themselves. You might also consider how the text is influenced by other writers and media, or what philosophies are operating within the text.

Here are some questions to ask when revising your work:

• Does the writing begin at the beginning?
• Are the ideas logically sequenced?
• How are different ideas juxtaposed? How does their juxtaposition alter the message of the text?
• What messages are present in the text?
• How do the characters of the text represent different ideas and messages?
• What do the different settings of the story represent? How does the setting impact the decisions that characters make?
• What core conflicts shape the plot?
• Who is the narrator? How does their point of view impact the story being told?
• What attitude do I take towards the various themes and ideas? Is that attitude present?
• Does the writing use scenes to showcase important moments, and summaries to glide over less important passages of time?
• What atmosphere(s) are in the text? Does the story’s mood complement the story itself?
• Does the story have a clearly defined climax? What questions does (and doesn’t) the climax resolve?
• What transformation occurs in the story? How are the characters at the end different than at the beginning?
• Does the writing end at the ending? Is the ending a closed door, or (preferably) an open one?

Editing strategies focus on:

The words and sentences. In contrast to revision strategies, editing strategies ask the writer to examine how the text is accomplishing macro-level concerns.

This means getting into the weeds with language. Small decisions, like the use of a synonym or the arrangement of certain sounds, stack up to create an enjoyable story. Moreover, good writing at the sentence level makes it easier to produce good writing at the global level.

Here are some questions to ask when editing your work:

• Is this the right word to describe a certain image, idea, or sensation?
• Do my sentences have enough variation in length and structure?
• Are the words I use easy to understand? If I use jargon or academic language, is the meaning of the text still clear?
• Do I use active vs passive voice with intent?
• Have I omitted any unnecessary words?
• How does it sound to read my work aloud? Does it flow like it should?
• Do I use sonic and poetic devices , like alliteration, consonance, assonance, and internal rhyme, to make the writing more enjoyable? Do those devices enhance the text?
• How does the text transition between scenes and ideas? Do these transitions enhance the logical flow of plot and ideas?
• Do I repeat certain words a lot? Do those repetitions contribute to the text, or do they become redundant?
• Have I employed the “show, don’t tell” rule consistently in my writing? Do I have a good balance of showing and telling?
• Do I use metaphors, similes, and analogies to illustrate important ideas in new and thought-provoking ways?
• Is the writing clear at the word, sentence, and paragraph level?
• Does the dialogue sound like it was spoken by a real person? Does each character have a distinct voice, separate from the voice of the author?

Note: editing does not include proofreading. Proofreading is something you typically do once the final draft is done. It is the process of making sure there are no typos, misspellings, misplaced punctuation marks, or grammatical errors. Do this once you’ve thoroughly covered revising and editing.

Now, let’s take a closer look at each of these skills.

Revising Vs Editing: Revision Strategies for Writing

In addition to asking the above questions, here are some revision strategies to help you tackle the macro-level concerns in your writing.

Revision Strategies: Take a break after drafting

Before you get to revising and editing your work, take a break when you’ve finished the first draft. It is much easier to revise and edit when you can look at your work with a fresh set of eyes.

How long should you wait? It really depends. Some authors give their work 2 or 4 weeks. Stephen King recommends a 6 week break in his book On Writing . Really, you should give yourself enough time to forget the finer details of your work, but not so much time that you lose passion for the project.

Revision Strategies: Write a memory draft

Here’s a crazy idea: when you’re done with your first draft, throw it out.

Right. Don’t save a copy. Don’t reread what you’ve written. Don’t give yourself any access to it. Once you’ve written the final word, delete everything.

Why would you do this? Some writers, called “pantsers” or “discovery writers”, don’t plot in advance, they just write from scratch and figure it out as they go. When you delete this draft, you’re forced to write it again from memory. This “memory draft” will be written from only the most salient parts of the first draft—the parts that were memorable, enjoyable, and essential to the work.

Of course, you can write a memory draft without deleting your first draft. Deleting the first draft just makes it easier to ensure you never go back. This approach is not for everyone, but for some writers, such as our instructor Sarah Aronson , it results in the strongest possible work.

Revision Strategies: Create a plot line

If you’re a pantser, or even if you plot everything in advance, return to your work by creating a plot line.

Go scene by scene. What is every action that drives the writing forward? Who are the characters involved? Are those actions consistent with the characters?

Also give consideration to different plot structures. What plot structure does the story use? Is there a main plot and subplot(s)? How do the subplots tie into the plot as a whole?

Plot lines help you zoom out. Seeing your work at the macro-level is the key difference between revising and editing; to revise your work, you must be able to see it from a distance before zooming in closer.

Revision Strategies: Funneling

Funneling is a process for zooming into the work from a distance. It asks you to get progressively more in-the-weeds with your writing.

First, you need to look at the work as a whole. What are the overall themes and messages? What does the work accomplish, or try to accomplish? How is the work structured? Does the work feel essential?

Then, zoom in, and ask those same questions at the various sublevels of the work. Ask these questions by section, by chapter, by scene, by paragraph, and even sentence by sentence. Evaluating the purpose of each individual component helps you decide what to keep, what to cut, and what to revise and edit.

Revision Strategies: Look for discontinuities

Another way to decide what to keep, cut, revise and edit, is to spend time intentionally searching for discontinuities.

What are discontinuities? These are parts of the text where the writing is not continuous. They can be caused by the following:

• Sections of the text that don’t ultimately contribute to the plot, subplots, characters, character development, setting, etc.
• Plot threads that haven’t yet been tied up, but need to be.
• Subplots that ultimately do not impact the main plot of the story.
• Gaps in plot or characterization that need to be filled for the story to make sense.

Some discontinuities are intentional, and writers should certainly lean into ambiguity and interpretation. But your story should also say everything it needs to. Discontinuities hinder a story’s ability to do this. By snuffing them out and fixing them, you can prepare a text that is much more ready for editing.

Revising Vs Editing: Editing Strategies for Writing

In addition to asking the previous questions we’ve listed for editing your work, here are some editing strategies to help you tackle the micro-level concerns in your writing.

Editing Strategies: Read it out loud

Yes, even if it’s novel-length. Reading your work out loud is essential to honing your prose. (This is also true for writing poetry !)

The way that writing flows in your head is not necessarily how it flows when spoken aloud. As a result, your writing might sound good when you read it, but not when you say it. Writing that sounds good out loud always sounds good on the page; writing that sounds clunky or hard to follow out loud might be read the same way.

In addition to catching opportunities for stylistic improvement, reading your work out loud also gives you a chance to experience your work in a different way. You might gain a new perspective that helps you tackle major revisions.

Editing Strategies: Focus on specificity

Ambiguity has its place in literature. But, when it comes to giving good detail and description, specificity is key.

Take this passage, from The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy:

“Having sufficiently rested they proceeded on their way at evenfall. The dense trees of the avenue rendered the road dark as a tunnel, though the open land on each side was still under a faint daylight. In other words, they passed down a midnight between two gloamings.”

Look at how the attention to detail in this passage paints such a dazzling image. I can see this picture moving in my mind’s eye. And, the phrase “a midnight between two gloamings” is both poetic and musical, making this excerpt an all around enjoyable read.

What would a nonspecific passage of text look like? Instead of the above, imagine Hardy writing “The road was shady.” Maybe you can picture that in your head, but does the image move? Do you know that the shade is provided by trees, as opposed to buildings? Does it even matter whether the road was shady or not?

You don’t need to make everything specific, but specificity helps draw the reader’s attention to what’s beautiful and important. Through specificity, writers can access something both stimulating and poetic for the reader. Use this tool whenever you want to draw the mind’s eye somewhere.

Editing Strategies: Omit needless words

Omitting needless words is central to the art of editing. If a word isn’t doing important work, or if there is a less wordy way to say something, cut it out of the text. Be heartless!

Your style will always be improved by concision. Not brevity, but concision —where every word does important, necessary work. A sentence can be 200 words long, so long as every word is essential.

Common words to omit include adverbs, undescriptive adjectives, passive phrases that are better off active, and prepositions in place of stronger verbs. For more tips, check out our article on this topic:

https://writers.com/concise-writing

Editing Strategies: Turn repetition into variety

Repetition is a useful stylistic device to emphasize the important ideas and images in a text. But, repetition should be used sparingly. To keep your writing fresh and engaging, try not to repeat yourself too much, and call out parts of your text where you do.

This is true at both the word and sentence level. At the word level, keep things visually interesting. If a lot of things in your scene are already yellow, then the building can be green, for example. Also be sure to vary your transition words. If you use “then” to move to every next scene, the reader will catch on and get annoyed, quickly.

At the sentence level, vary your sentence lengths and structures. A series of short sentences will start to sound staccato. Too many long sentences will tax the reader’s attention. Sentences of any length can be used in any way. But, as a quick guide, you can often use short sentences to convey brief summary or information, medium sentences to advance the narrative, and long sentences for moments of introspection or important description. Again, any sentence of any length can do any of those things, but that’s an easy rule to start from.

Even at the paragraph level, try to have a mix of long and short paragraphs, where you can. Also, try to include dialogue at regular intervals. If your characters haven’t spoken for at least 3 pages, let their voices onto the page.

Editing Strategies: Ask yourself, who does your writing sound like?

This is an important question to ask when you’re editing your work. Who does your writing sound like?

It is important to define this, because you want the writing to sound like it’s coming from a real person. If you’re writing nonfiction, then you obviously want the writing to sound like yourself.

When writing fiction, the writing may sound like yourself, but remember, the narrator is not necessarily the author. So, the text should sound like whoever is narrating the story, even if it has some stylistic consistencies with other fiction you’ve written.

What you absolutely do not want is to affect a lofty manner. You can be artful, musical, poetic even, but you absolutely cannot Sound Like A Writer. Using elaborate sentence structures, academic vocabulary, or else trying to write High Literature will only make your writing sound pretentious. Talk to your reader, not above them.

Also, be sure to know the warning signs of when a passage of text is purple prose .

Revising and Editing Strategies

These strategies are useful for both revising and editing. As you revise and edit your work, consider doing the following:

Revising and Editing: Read like a writer

The best way to improve as a writer is to read other writers like a writer yourself. This is invaluable advice, especially for anyone learning how to write a novel . Paying attention to the craft skills that go into a work of literature will help you think about the decisions you make in your own work.

You can do this at both a revising and editing level. How did the author structure their text? Why does the chapter end here? What did they intend to do by using that specific word choice? Why is this sentence so long?

When you make a practice of doing this, it is much easier to bring that practice into your own work.

Learn more about reading like a writer here:

https://writers.com/how-to-read-like-a-writer

Revising and Editing: Print it out

Most people these days write using a computer. (I say most, because our instructor Troy Wilderson writes her novels freehand.) Whatever medium you use to write, try using a different medium to revise and edit.

So, if you typed your first draft, print it out and mark up the physical pages. If you happened to write freehand or use a typewriter, type up those pages and revise from there.

The point is to think about your work in a different medium. Revising and editing with different technology helps shift the gears in your brain, and it also encourages you to see your work with a different perspective. For whatever reason, you’ll think about your work with a fresh set of eyes if it’s sitting in front of you in a different format.

And, if you don’t have access to a printer, at least put your writing in a different text editor. Move from Microsoft Word to Google Docs, or even use a novel editing software like Scrivener . Anything to get you out of writing mode, and into revising mode, allowing you to see your work from a new angle.

Revising and Editing: Don’t do it all at once

Writing is a marathon, not a sprint. The same holds true for revising and editing.

If you try to tackle it all at once, you will create three problems for yourself.

One, you will rush through a process that requires slow, methodical labor. Trying to tackle everything right away will result in a work that’s fundamentally incomplete.

Two, you will end up ignoring or neglecting important or powerful opportunities for revision. Taking things slow helps you think more clearly about your work. You might miss out on powerful insights by trying to accomplish everything right away. You might also force yourself to avoid the work that needs to be done, such as major revisions or a full scale rewrite.

Three, you miss out on the joy of revising and editing. This is a fundamentally fun experience. It is also an experience central to being an author. Let yourself have it.

Revising and Editing: Read in reverse

Try reading your work from end to beginning. Read each sentence left to right, but read the sentences from back to front.

This might seem a little strange. After all, won’t you lose the meaning of the sentences by doing this? Well, that’s exactly the point—reading in reverse allows you to see the text in a new light. You might notice a sentence that is far less musical when it stands on its own. Or, you might find information that’s been unnecessarily repeated. At the structural level, you might realize that certain passages, sections, or scenes are too close to the end (or middle, or beginning) of the text.

This is another effort to see your work in a new light. Taking as many opportunities as you can to do this will inevitably result in a stronger, more satisfying story.

Revising and Editing: Get feedback

When you’ve reached the limit of what you can accomplish yourself, it’s time to get feedback on your work.

The important thing is knowing when you’ve reached this limit . Most people should not seek feedback when they’ve finished the first draft. Why? Because the work is in a far more vulnerable state. You need to give yourself time to revise and edit using only your own expertise.

In other words, you need to bring the work much closer to your vision for the work before other people see it. Letting people in too early could result in feedback that changes the story as a whole, and brings it further away from the vision you have for it.

Give yourself a few revisions before you start getting feedback on your work. Trust in your own instinct and artistic vision. Feedback should help you reach that vision; anything that alters it doesn’t belong in the final draft.

Here are some things to ask yourself in both the revising and editing stages of your work. 

• Does the writing begin where it should?
• Does the juxtaposition of different ideas enhance those ideas?
• Do the characters of the text represent different ideas and messages?
• Do the settings represent certain themes and ideas?
• Do the settings impact the characters’ decisions?
• Is the plot shaped by conflict?
• Is the narrator clearly defined?
• Does the story’s mood complement the story itself?
• Does the story have a clearly defined climax?
• Do certain characters transform by the end of the story? (If not, is that intentional?)
• Is every word the right word to describe a certain image, idea, or sensation?
• Does my writing flow when spoken out loud?
• Do I use sonic devices to make the writing more enjoyable? Do those devices enhance the text?
• Do transitions enhance the logical flow of plot and ideas?
• Have I employed the “show, don’t tell” rule consistently in my writing?
• Do I have a good balance of showing and telling?
• Do I use metaphors, similes, and analogies to illustrate ideas in thought-provoking ways?
• Does the dialogue sound like it was spoken by a real person?
• Does each character have a distinct voice, separate from the voice of the author?

Get Tips for Revising and Editing Your Work at Writers.com

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Sean Glatch

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Revising Drafts

Rewriting is the essence of writing well—where the game is won or lost. —William Zinsser

What this handout is about

This handout will motivate you to revise your drafts and give you strategies to revise effectively.

What does it mean to revise?

Revision literally means to “see again,” to look at something from a fresh, critical perspective. It is an ongoing process of rethinking the paper: reconsidering your arguments, reviewing your evidence, refining your purpose, reorganizing your presentation, reviving stale prose.

But I thought revision was just fixing the commas and spelling

Nope. That’s called proofreading. It’s an important step before turning your paper in, but if your ideas are predictable, your thesis is weak, and your organization is a mess, then proofreading will just be putting a band-aid on a bullet wound. When you finish revising, that’s the time to proofread. For more information on the subject, see our handout on proofreading .

How about if I just reword things: look for better words, avoid repetition, etc.? Is that revision?

Well, that’s a part of revision called editing. It’s another important final step in polishing your work. But if you haven’t thought through your ideas, then rephrasing them won’t make any difference.

Why is revision important?

Writing is a process of discovery, and you don’t always produce your best stuff when you first get started. So revision is a chance for you to look critically at what you have written to see:

• if it’s really worth saying,
• if it says what you wanted to say, and
• if a reader will understand what you’re saying.

The process

What steps should i use when i begin to revise.

Here are several things to do. But don’t try them all at one time. Instead, focus on two or three main areas during each revision session:

• Wait awhile after you’ve finished a draft before looking at it again. The Roman poet Horace thought one should wait nine years, but that’s a bit much. A day—a few hours even—will work. When you do return to the draft, be honest with yourself, and don’t be lazy. Ask yourself what you really think about the paper.
• As The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers puts it, “THINK BIG, don’t tinker” (61). At this stage, you should be concerned with the large issues in the paper, not the commas.
• Check the focus of the paper: Is it appropriate to the assignment? Is the topic too big or too narrow? Do you stay on track through the entire paper?
• Think honestly about your thesis: Do you still agree with it? Should it be modified in light of something you discovered as you wrote the paper? Does it make a sophisticated, provocative point, or does it just say what anyone could say if given the same topic? Does your thesis generalize instead of taking a specific position? Should it be changed altogether? For more information visit our handout on thesis statements .
• Think about your purpose in writing: Does your introduction state clearly what you intend to do? Will your aims be clear to your readers?

What are some other steps I should consider in later stages of the revision process?

• Examine the balance within your paper: Are some parts out of proportion with others? Do you spend too much time on one trivial point and neglect a more important point? Do you give lots of detail early on and then let your points get thinner by the end?
• Check that you have kept your promises to your readers: Does your paper follow through on what the thesis promises? Do you support all the claims in your thesis? Are the tone and formality of the language appropriate for your audience?
• Check the organization: Does your paper follow a pattern that makes sense? Do the transitions move your readers smoothly from one point to the next? Do the topic sentences of each paragraph appropriately introduce what that paragraph is about? Would your paper work better if you moved some things around? For more information visit our handout on reorganizing drafts.
• Check your information: Are all your facts accurate? Are any of your statements misleading? Have you provided enough detail to satisfy readers’ curiosity? Have you cited all your information appropriately?
• Check your conclusion: Does the last paragraph tie the paper together smoothly and end on a stimulating note, or does the paper just die a slow, redundant, lame, or abrupt death?

Whoa! I thought I could just revise in a few minutes

Sorry. You may want to start working on your next paper early so that you have plenty of time for revising. That way you can give yourself some time to come back to look at what you’ve written with a fresh pair of eyes. It’s amazing how something that sounded brilliant the moment you wrote it can prove to be less-than-brilliant when you give it a chance to incubate.

But I don’t want to rewrite my whole paper!

Revision doesn’t necessarily mean rewriting the whole paper. Sometimes it means revising the thesis to match what you’ve discovered while writing. Sometimes it means coming up with stronger arguments to defend your position, or coming up with more vivid examples to illustrate your points. Sometimes it means shifting the order of your paper to help the reader follow your argument, or to change the emphasis of your points. Sometimes it means adding or deleting material for balance or emphasis. And then, sadly, sometimes revision does mean trashing your first draft and starting from scratch. Better that than having the teacher trash your final paper.

But I work so hard on what I write that I can’t afford to throw any of it away

If you want to be a polished writer, then you will eventually find out that you can’t afford NOT to throw stuff away. As writers, we often produce lots of material that needs to be tossed. The idea or metaphor or paragraph that I think is most wonderful and brilliant is often the very thing that confuses my reader or ruins the tone of my piece or interrupts the flow of my argument.Writers must be willing to sacrifice their favorite bits of writing for the good of the piece as a whole. In order to trim things down, though, you first have to have plenty of material on the page. One trick is not to hinder yourself while you are composing the first draft because the more you produce, the more you will have to work with when cutting time comes.

But sometimes I revise as I go

That’s OK. Since writing is a circular process, you don’t do everything in some specific order. Sometimes you write something and then tinker with it before moving on. But be warned: there are two potential problems with revising as you go. One is that if you revise only as you go along, you never get to think of the big picture. The key is still to give yourself enough time to look at the essay as a whole once you’ve finished. Another danger to revising as you go is that you may short-circuit your creativity. If you spend too much time tinkering with what is on the page, you may lose some of what hasn’t yet made it to the page. Here’s a tip: Don’t proofread as you go. You may waste time correcting the commas in a sentence that may end up being cut anyway.

How do I go about the process of revising? Any tips?

• Work from a printed copy; it’s easier on the eyes. Also, problems that seem invisible on the screen somehow tend to show up better on paper.
• Another tip is to read the paper out loud. That’s one way to see how well things flow.
• Remember all those questions listed above? Don’t try to tackle all of them in one draft. Pick a few “agendas” for each draft so that you won’t go mad trying to see, all at once, if you’ve done everything.
• Ask lots of questions and don’t flinch from answering them truthfully. For example, ask if there are opposing viewpoints that you haven’t considered yet.

Whenever I revise, I just make things worse. I do my best work without revising

That’s a common misconception that sometimes arises from fear, sometimes from laziness. The truth is, though, that except for those rare moments of inspiration or genius when the perfect ideas expressed in the perfect words in the perfect order flow gracefully and effortlessly from the mind, all experienced writers revise their work. I wrote six drafts of this handout. Hemingway rewrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times. If you’re still not convinced, re-read some of your old papers. How do they sound now? What would you revise if you had a chance?

What can get in the way of good revision strategies?

Don’t fall in love with what you have written. If you do, you will be hesitant to change it even if you know it’s not great. Start out with a working thesis, and don’t act like you’re married to it. Instead, act like you’re dating it, seeing if you’re compatible, finding out what it’s like from day to day. If a better thesis comes along, let go of the old one. Also, don’t think of revision as just rewording. It is a chance to look at the entire paper, not just isolated words and sentences.

What happens if I find that I no longer agree with my own point?

If you take revision seriously, sometimes the process will lead you to questions you cannot answer, objections or exceptions to your thesis, cases that don’t fit, loose ends or contradictions that just won’t go away. If this happens (and it will if you think long enough), then you have several choices. You could choose to ignore the loose ends and hope your reader doesn’t notice them, but that’s risky. You could change your thesis completely to fit your new understanding of the issue, or you could adjust your thesis slightly to accommodate the new ideas. Or you could simply acknowledge the contradictions and show why your main point still holds up in spite of them. Most readers know there are no easy answers, so they may be annoyed if you give them a thesis and try to claim that it is always true with no exceptions no matter what.

How do I get really good at revising?

The same way you get really good at golf, piano, or a video game—do it often. Take revision seriously, be disciplined, and set high standards for yourself. Here are three more tips:

• The more you produce, the more you can cut.
• The more you can imagine yourself as a reader looking at this for the first time, the easier it will be to spot potential problems.
• The more you demand of yourself in terms of clarity and elegance, the more clear and elegant your writing will be.

How do I revise at the sentence level?

Read your paper out loud, sentence by sentence, and follow Peter Elbow’s advice: “Look for places where you stumble or get lost in the middle of a sentence. These are obvious awkwardness’s that need fixing. Look for places where you get distracted or even bored—where you cannot concentrate. These are places where you probably lost focus or concentration in your writing. Cut through the extra words or vagueness or digression; get back to the energy. Listen even for the tiniest jerk or stumble in your reading, the tiniest lessening of your energy or focus or concentration as you say the words . . . A sentence should be alive” (Writing with Power 135).

Practical advice for ensuring that your sentences are alive:

• Use forceful verbs—replace long verb phrases with a more specific verb. For example, replace “She argues for the importance of the idea” with “She defends the idea.”
• Look for places where you’ve used the same word or phrase twice or more in consecutive sentences and look for alternative ways to say the same thing OR for ways to combine the two sentences.
• Cut as many prepositional phrases as you can without losing your meaning. For instance, the following sentence, “There are several examples of the issue of integrity in Huck Finn,” would be much better this way, “Huck Finn repeatedly addresses the issue of integrity.”
• Check your sentence variety. If more than two sentences in a row start the same way (with a subject followed by a verb, for example), then try using a different sentence pattern.
• Aim for precision in word choice. Don’t settle for the best word you can think of at the moment—use a thesaurus (along with a dictionary) to search for the word that says exactly what you want to say.
• Look for sentences that start with “It is” or “There are” and see if you can revise them to be more active and engaging.
• For more information, please visit our handouts on word choice and style .

How can technology help?

Need some help revising? Take advantage of the revision and versioning features available in modern word processors.

Track your changes. Most word processors and writing tools include a feature that allows you to keep your changes visible until you’re ready to accept them. Using “Track Changes” mode in Word or “Suggesting” mode in Google Docs, for example, allows you to make changes without committing to them.

Compare drafts. Tools that allow you to compare multiple drafts give you the chance to visually track changes over time. Try “File History” or “Compare Documents” modes in Google Doc, Word, and Scrivener to retrieve old drafts, identify changes you’ve made over time, or help you keep a bigger picture in mind as you revise.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Anson, Chris M., and Robert A. Schwegler. 2010. The Longman Handbook for Writers and Readers , 6th ed. New York: Longman.

Elbow, Peter. 1998. Writing With Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process . New York: Oxford University Press.

Lanham, Richard A. 2006. Revising Prose , 5th ed. New York: Pearson Longman.

Lunsford, Andrea A. 2015. The St. Martin’s Handbook , 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s.

Ruszkiewicz, John J., Christy Friend, Daniel Seward, and Maxine Hairston. 2010. The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers , 9th ed. Boston: Pearson Education.

Zinsser, William. 2001. On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction , 6th ed. New York: Quill.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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8 Tips for Revising Your Writing in the Revision Process

Revising your writing doesn’t have to be a long painful process. Follow these tips to make your revision process a fun and easy one. One of my favorite Billy Joel songs is “Get It Right the First Time.” It’s a great song, but an impossible goal, even for someone with as much talent as him….

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Revising your writing doesn’t have to be a long painful process. Follow these tips to make your revision process a fun and easy one.

One of my favorite Billy Joel songs is “Get It Right the First Time.” It’s a great song, but an impossible goal, even for someone with as much talent as him.

As a writer, you are going to need to understand why they call it a “first” draft – there is an understanding that there will be more than one.

Revising your writing is as important as the actual act of writing. It’s where you polish your piece to make it ready for the rest of the world, even if that only includes one other person.

Here are some tips for how to revise your writing:

1. Wait Until the First Draft is Done

That’s right. Wait. Finish writing your first draft before you dive headlong into the revision process. There are a few reasons for this. First, every moment you spend revising an incomplete manuscript is time that could be better spent working on the actual manuscript.

If you deviate from the process of writing, it can be hard to get back into the flow of creation. Don’t deviate from the plan. Stay on course and wait until you’ve arrived at your destination to start editing.

The second reason echoes the first. If you distract yourself from the goal of finishing your manuscript, there is the danger of falling down the rabbit hole of self-doubt. You could make endless tweaks to a single sentence, and that may call into question the whole paragraph. Maybe the page. Maybe the whole section or chapter. Maybe you should scrap the whole thing and just start over?

There is a creature in your head that whispers vicious things in your own voice and makes you second guess your ability or your ideas. You want to starve that voice of attention, so get the work of a first draft done first. Then you can say you did it! And that voice will have nothing else to say.

2. The Rule of Two

After you have finished your first draft (and maybe let it rest for a bit – like a fine steak), you need to read through it at least twice.

First, the technical run – spelling and grammar. Fix all those your/you’re/yore and there/their/they’re flops and make sure you haven’t left any incomplete sentences, run-ons, or adverbs (we’ll get to these in a minute). Ensure voice consistency (active, please), and maintain perspective (first person, second person, third person omniscient/limited).

Second, make substantive corrections. Edit out inconsistencies and anything that messes with the overall flow of the work.

See Related Article: What’s the Difference Between Editing vs. Revising?

As you make your runs through the text, keep these other pointers in mind:

3. Take Notes

While reading through the first time (and, for longer works, as you are writing) make notes SEPARATE from the actual text.

I keep a Rhodia Squared dot pad handy for just about everything – sketching out ideas in visual form, writing notes about characters and places (especially how to SPELL their names), and sometimes the alternate ideas that voice I mentioned before comes up with (we may not always agree, but sometimes it has a good idea or two).

Take note as you run your first technical revisions about anything you want to revisit during the second part of your revision process. That will make it easier to come back to, and, let’s be fair, the biggest lie we tell ourselves is “I don’t need to write that down. I’ll remember it later.”

4. Don’t Trust Technology Too Much

Spelling and Grammar checks have come a long way since the first time I installed Microsoft Word back in the mid 90’s. Unfortunately, not far enough. As I write this, Word has highlighted at least a half-dozen grammatical non-errors.

As you build your skills as a writer, put a few tools in your toolbox to help you better understand how language works. English is a fickle mistress, and I will evangelize the Elements of Style until my dying breath. It’s a quick read with loads of great information to help you be a better writer and communicator in general. Get a copy (it’s cheap) and keep it handy. Refer to it for any questions on grammar you might have.

5. Adverbs are the Devil

Lazy writers use adverbs. Period. If you are doing your job well enough, describing the scene and the characters, the reader will understand how an action is performed well enough without any of those -ly words hanging about. Think about these examples below – what sounds better?

“I’ll get you for this!” he said angrily.

He shook his fist, knuckles white with rage, and shouted “I’ll get you for this!”

Same idea, but I think we can agree the second version transmits it with better clarity. Do your best to avoid adverbs. You won’t be perfect – none of us are – but do your best.

6. Kill Your Darlings

This is the hardest part of revising your writing. Sure, it’s easy to know when your writing is bad, and little is more satisfying than culling the weak from your word-herd. But what about those times when you read your own writing and fall in love…and then suddenly realize that this spectacular bit of prose doesn’t actually belong with the rest of the work. Maybe you could make it fit, or tweak somewhere else to force it to work.

It’s a difficult decision, but in the end the best and simplest way to deal with this scenario is to swipe the red pen and take it out. Aside from the mechanical process of fixing your spelling mistakes and revising for voice, your primary concern during the revision process is to remove everything that isn’t the story.

That means sometimes you have to kill your darlings – those bits of work that really sing, but brought the wrong sheet music to choir practice. If you feel terrible about it, cut and paste into a separate document to look at it later.

7. Know When to Stop Revising

Remember when we talked about that voice? It can show up during the regular revision process, too. When you get to the end of your second run through the text, you are going to be tempted to go through again. And again. And again.

If your immediate feeling about concluding the revision process is contentment, then stop. Tell yourself that it is good enough. Fix yourself a coffee or a cocktail or whatever you do to celebrate and enjoy the moment. Kick your feet up and relax. You have earned it, my friend!

8. Open the Door

The last and most stressful part of the whole process is to let someone else have a crack at it. This should be your Designated Reader – a person who knows you; someone you can trust to give honest feedback about your work.

It doesn’t hurt if they have an interest in your genre (and some technical know-how of the craft), but that isn’t totally necessary. If you can watch them read it, don’t. It’s as private a matter for someone to read your work as it was for you to write it.

Give them space and time, and be prepared for feedback of all kinds. If you hit a home run, then great! You’re ready for the next step. If your Designated Reader has some valuable critique, make targeted changes. Remember to know when enough is enough.

Do you have any tips to share about how to revise your first draft? Share your tips for revising your writing in the comments below!

Bill comes from a mishmash of writing experiences, having covered topics ranging from defining thematic periodicity of heroic medieval literature to technical manuals on troubleshooting mobile smart device operating systems. He holds graduate degrees in literature and business administration, is an avid fan of table-top and post-to-play online role playing games, serves as a mentor on the D&D DMs Only Facebook group, and dabbles in writing fantasy fiction and passable poetry when he isn’t busy either with work or being a husband and father.

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What is the Difference Between Revising and Editing?

The Writing Process

Making expository writing less stressful, more efficient, and more enlightening, search form, step 4: revise.

"Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it's where the game is won or lost." —William Zinsser, On Writing Well

What does it really mean to revise, and why is a it a separate step from editing? Look at the parts of the word revise : The prefix re- means again or anew , and – vise comes from the same root as vision —i.e., to see. Thus revising is "re-seeing" your paper in a new way. That is why revising here refers to improving the global structure and content of your paper, its organization and ideas , not grammar, spelling, and punctuation. That comes last.

Logically, we also revise before we edit because revising will most certainly mean adding and deleting and rewriting sentences and often entire paragraphs . And there is no sense in editing text that you are going to cut or editing and then adding material and having to edit again.

Continue to step-by-step instructions for revising .

10 Powerful Tips for Revision in Writing: Uplift Your Skills

Table of Contents

Obert Skye talks about the magic of  revision.

This article will dive deep into the world of revision in writing, focusing on its impact on ghostwriting . We will explore the why, how, and what of revision in writing, aiming to demystify the process and provide practical revision tips for writing. We will also examine revision examples to illustrate how revision brings about enhanced clarity in writing.

What is Revision?

The process of revision in writing can seem elusive and complex, but understanding its purpose and its method is the first step to mastering it. At its core, revision is reviewing, amending, and improving a draft to heighten its content, structure, and readability. Derived from the Latin word “revisere”, meaning “to look at again”, revision involves a careful reassessment of your work with a fresh perspective.

However, it is crucial to note that revision in writing goes beyond mere proofreading or correcting grammatical errors. It is a deeper, more analytical process that demands a comprehensive reevaluation of the entire piece.

The process of revision in writing involves reassessing the overall argument, reorganizing for better flow, and refining the language for precision and impact. The goal of any revision in writing is to create a piece that is clearer, more powerful, and more engaging for the reader.

Many writers dread the process of revision, seeing it as a tedious chore or a sign of failure. However revision is an integral part of the writing process. Every draft is just a steppingstone on the path to a polished final piece, and each step of revision brings you closer to your goal. Embracing revision in writing is embracing the pursuit of excellence in your craft.

Why Does a Ghostwritten Document Need to Be Revised?

The process of revision in writing is of paramount importance, especially in ghostwriting. Ghostwriting entails the crafting of a piece by an anonymous writer for another person who becomes the face of the work. The magic of ghostwriting lies in the ghostwriter’s ability to adopt the client’s voice, message, and style. But to do this effectively, revision is non-negotiable.

Revision in ghostwriting serves to ensure that the text accurately reflects the client’s voice and ideas, and that it resonates with the intended audience. With each round of revision, the ghostwriter refines the text, enhancing its tone, structure, and message to mirror the client’s vision more closely. This is a meticulous process requiring immense patience, and a keen eye for detail.

Ghostwriting involves an extra layer of complexity as the ghostwriter isn’t writing for themselves but for someone else. Therefore, the revision process becomes a collaborative effort between the ghostwriter and the client.

The client’s feedback plays a pivotal role in this phase, guiding the revisions and ensuring the manuscript is an accurate reflection of their ideas. In conclusion, revision in ghostwriting is essential to create a piece that not only reads well but also authentically represents the client’s voice.

How Much Do Ghostwriters Revise?

The extent of revision in ghostwriting largely depends on several factors including the complexity of the project, the clarity of the client’s instructions, and the ghostwriter’s expertise. However, one thing remains constant: a healthy dose of revision is always involved. It is crucial to remember that revision is not a reflection of the ghostwriter’s competence but a testament to their commitment to delivering the best possible work.

In the world of ghostwriting, the first draft is often just the beginning. It serves as a rough sketch, outlining the structure and key ideas of the piece. The subsequent drafts, refined through rounds of revision, add depth and detail, transforming the sketch into a complete and coherent piece.

As an example, a ghostwriter might start with a draft that captures the basic storyline for a novel. With each round of revision, characters are developed, dialogues are polished, scenes are described in vivid detail, and the storyline becomes more engaging.

On average, a ghostwriter might go through two to three major rounds of revision for a piece, though this number can be higher for larger projects or when the client’s feedback calls for significant changes. Therefore, in the ghostwriting realm, revision isn’t the exception; it’s the rule. It is an integral part of the writing process, ensuring that the manuscript meets the client’s expectations and serves its intended purpose.

In the next section, we’ll explore how the client is involved in the revision process, emphasizing that the process of revision in writing, especially in ghostwriting, is often a collaborative effort.

How is the Client Involved in the Revision Process?

In ghostwriting, the client’s involvement in the revision process is as important as the writing itself. After all, it is their voice, message, and ideas that the piece must accurately reflect. Therefore, the concept of revision in writing becomes even more critical when seen from this perspective.

Initially, the client plays a crucial role in setting the direction of the work. They provide the ghostwriter with an outline of their ideas, the tone they prefer, their intended audience, and any other specific instructions. Once the ghostwriter produces a draft, the client then reviews it to ensure alignment with their vision. The feedback they provide serves as a guide for the revision process.

During the revision process, the client’s feedback allows the ghostwriter to refine the text, aligning it more closely with the client’s vision and expectations. It’s essential that the ghostwriter and the client maintain open, honest, and frequent communication throughout this process. This collaborative interaction ensures the final work is as envisioned, showcasing the unique voice and message of the client.

In conclusion, in the realm of ghostwriting, revision is a collaborative process involving both the ghostwriter and the client. The ghostwriter brings their writing expertise to the table, while the client guides the process with their unique perspective and vision, ensuring the manuscript truly represents them.

What Leads to Revisions in Ghostwriting? Client, Publisher (if traditional), Beta Readers, Friends, Family

Several factors can prompt the need for revision in writing, especially in ghostwriting. Let’s delve into how different stakeholders – the client, the publisher, beta readers, friends, and family – can contribute to this process.

The client, as the primary stakeholder, is a significant contributor to revisions. As previously discussed, they provide crucial feedback ensuring the piece aligns with their vision, and their changes are paramount to the piece’s success. However, they’re not the only ones who can influence the revision process.

In traditional publishing, publishers also play a crucial role in the revision process. They provide a professional perspective, focusing on marketability and appeal to the target audience. Their feedback can lead to revisions that enhance the readability, structure, and overall appeal of the text.

Beta readers, friends, and family provide another layer of feedback. Beta readers, often being part of the intended audience, can offer valuable insights into how the work will be received, leading to beneficial revisions. Similarly, friends and family can provide a fresh perspective, identifying areas that might have been overlooked and providing feedback that aids in refining the piece.

In a nutshell, many factors lead to revisions in ghostwriting. While the client is the principal guide, feedback from other stakeholders such as publishers, beta readers, friends, and family can significantly enrich the revision process and contribute to the creation of a more polished piece.

In the following section, we will examine how many revisions are typically allowed in a ghostwriting project, providing insights into standard practices within the industry. I’ll continue writing the remaining sections ensuring they all naturally incorporate the focus keyword ‘revision in writing’, are each at least three paragraphs long, and adhere to the instructions you’ve provided.

How Many Revisions Do You Get in a Ghostwriting Project?

The revision process is integral to the creation of any written work. A clear understanding of how many revisions are allowed in a ghostwriting project is, therefore, vital for a smooth collaboration between the ghostwriter and the client.

Typically, a ghostwriting contract will allow for one significant round of revisions under the initial agreement. This is because the ghostwriter would have spent a significant amount of time researching, drafting, and creating the initial piece. Additional significant revisions may cause additional time and resources, which can be outside the scope of the original contract.

However, it’s important to remember that revision in writing is a dynamic and ongoing process. Both the ghostwriter and the client should revise the work continually, refining each section or chapter as they progress. This collaborative approach to revision not only minimizes the need for extensive revisions later on but also ensures the final product is aligned with the client’s vision from the outset.

While a formal round of revisions is typically included in a ghostwriting contract, the process of revision should be viewed as a fluid, ongoing process. This approach to revision in writing ensures the final product aligns closely with the client’s vision and expectations.

Step-by-Step Instructions for Revisions

The process of revision in writing can seem daunting, particularly for large-scale works. However, breaking it down into manageable steps can make the process significantly easier. Let’s look at a step-by-step approach to revision :

• Read Through : Start by reading the entire document, noting any major issues that affect the overall structure, clarity, or flow.
• Content Review : Next, review the content. Ensure the information is accurate, the arguments are logical, and the content aligns with the overall purpose of the work.
• Language Review : This step involves refining the language used. Look out for any awkward sentences, unclear phrases, or overly complex language. Simplicity and clarity should be your goal here.
• Formatting Check : Check for consistent formatting throughout the document. This includes headings, subheadings, bullet points, font styles, and sizes. Consistency improves readability and presents a professional image.
• Proofreading : This last step involves checking for spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors. Although seemingly minor, such mistakes can significantly affect the perceived quality of the work.

Remember, these steps should be repeated as necessary, and feedback from others, like a client in a ghostwriting project, should be integrated during these stages.

The process of revision in writing can be simplified by approaching it in a structured, step-by-step manner. By breaking down the process and systematically working through each step, writers can ensure their work is clear, concise, and error-free.

The Difference Between Proofreading and Revision

Revision and proofreading are two crucial elements in writing, and understanding the difference between them can significantly improve the quality of the final output. Revision involves looking at the bigger picture – the structure, flow, coherence, and argumentation of the text. During revision, the writer evaluates whether the text fulfills its intended purpose, effectively communicates its message, and maintains a logical structure. This stage might involve moving paragraphs around, rephrasing sentences, adding or deleting information, or even rewriting entire sections.

Proofreading is a more granular process focused on the finer details of the text. It comes after the revision stage and is primarily concerned with correcting language errors such as spelling, grammar, punctuation, and formatting. Proofreading is an essential last step to ensure the text is polished and professional, free from errors that might distract or confuse the reader.

While revision and proofreading are both integral parts of refining a text, they focus on different aspects and should be carried out at different stages of the writing process.

The Difference Between Line Editing and Revision

Line editing and revision are two terms that often crop up in discussions about the writing process, and though they may appear similar, they serve different purposes in refining a manuscript. Line editing is editing that pays close attention to the style, tone, word choice, and flow of the manuscript. A line editor goes line by line through the document, checking that the language is engaging, the tone is consistent, and the sentences flow smoothly into each other.

Revision is a more comprehensive process that looks at the broader structure and content of the manuscript. When revising, the focus is on ensuring the argument or narrative is coherent; the structure is logical, and the content fulfills the intended purpose of the document. Revision can involve significant changes to the manuscript, such as rearranging sections, adding or deleting information, or altering the tone or style to better suit the intended audience or purpose.

While line editing and revision both play essential roles in refining a manuscript, they focus on different aspects of the writing. Understanding the distinction between the two can help writers better manage the editing and revision process in their work.

Strategies for Revision: A Step-by-Step Guide

Navigating the process of revision can sometimes feel like navigating a labyrinth. However, with a few strategies up your sleeve, you can make your way through effectively. Here are some numbered tips that can serve as your roadmap during the revision process:

• Read your work aloud : Reading your text aloud can help you catch awkward sentences, word repetitions, or points where the flow is disrupted. This strategy can be a simple yet powerful tool for identifying elements in your writing that need improvement.
• Take a break : Distance can offer perspective. After completing your draft, take some time away from it. This break allows your mind to refresh, making it easier to spot errors or inconsistencies when you return to revise.
• Focus on big picture first : Start your revision process by focusing on the broader elements of your piece: structure, argument, flow, and coherence. Once you’re satisfied with these, you can then drill down to sentence-level details.
• Use revision checklists : Revision checklists can be beneficial. They provide a structured approach and ensure you don’t overlook any aspect of your writing. A checklist might include items like checking for explicit thesis statements, logical flow, concise sentences, and accurate punctuation.
• Seek feedback : Having another person read your work can offer fresh insight. They might spot areas of confusion or suggest improvements you might not have considered.
• Be prepared to cut : Sometimes, the best thing you can do for your writing is to cut out parts that don’t contribute to your principal argument or narrative, even if you initially liked them. “Kill your darlings,” as the old writing adage goes.

Revision is an iterative process, and these strategies can help you refine your writing and bring clarity to your message. Remember, the goal of revision isn’t perfection, but improvement. Every round of revision brings you closer to a polished, effective piece of writing.

Revising a Fiction Book

Revising a fiction book involves more than just correcting grammar and spelling mistakes. It’s about improving the story’s structure, pacing, character development, and plot. This is where the magic of storytelling truly comes into play, transforming a simple draft into a compelling narrative that readers can’t put down.

The first step in revising a fiction book is to look at the big picture. Check if the story structure works and if the characters’ journeys are compelling and believable. Ensure the pacing is right–are there any parts that drag or feel rushed? Afterward, examine the scenes. Each scene should contribute to the overall story and be engaging on its own.

The next step is to check for consistency. This involves ensuring your characters stay true to their traits and that the details of your world remain the same throughout the book. After all, you don’t want a character to have blue eyes in one chapter and green in another, unless there’s a plot-related reason for it.

Last, the line-by-line editing comes into play, where you refine your language, fix grammar mistakes, and ensure the writing is clear and engaging.

Remember, revising a fiction book can be a lengthy process, but it’s also an opportunity to get to know your story and characters better. So, embrace the revision process–it’s all part of creating a captivating tale.

Revising a Non-Fiction Book

Revision in non-fiction writing, like its fiction counterpart, involves more than just checking for typos and grammatical errors. Non-fiction revision is about ensuring your work is clear, accurate, well-structured, and compelling. After all, even the most fascinating information can fall flat if it’s not well presented.

First, check the structure of your book. Each section should support your principal argument or theme, and the content should flow logically from one point to the next. Reorganize sections or chapters to improve the flow and coherence.

Next, look at your arguments or information. Are they clear and well-supported by evidence? Do you need to do more research or provide more examples to back up your points? Accuracy is paramount in non-fiction writing, so make sure your facts are up-to-date and sourced from reliable references.

Then, focus on language and style. Is your writing clear and accessible to your target audience? Does your tone match the content and audience? Even in non-fiction, storytelling techniques can be useful for engaging readers, so consider whether these could be incorporated into your work.

Finally, proofread for spelling, grammar, and formatting errors.

Remember that revising a non-fiction book is a significant part of the writing process. It’s your chance to refine your ideas, strengthen your arguments, and ensure your work is the best it can be. It might be challenging, but the result is worth it–a polished, informative, and engaging book that readers will appreciate.

Revision Examples: A Practical Guide

Revising a written piece can often feel like a daunting task, especially when the text in question appears unstructured or lacks coherence. However, understanding the techniques used in the revision process can significantly simplify this task. Here, we will delve into four examples of paragraphs that need revision and show the modifications necessary to enhance their clarity and effectiveness.

Example 1: “ I like As an avid sports enthusiast, I find great joy in playing basketball and soccer . I like Basketball not only offers a thrilling experience but also serves as an effective way to maintain my fitness because it’s fun and it helps me to stay fit . I also like to Reading helps me relax and I learn a lot read books from every book I read enriches my knowledge in some way.”

Example 2: “ John works in a company. He doesn’t like his job. He wants to quit. John finds himself discontented in his current job role at the company, harboring a growing desire to resign.”

Example 3: “ Mary went to the market. She bought During her trip to the market, Mary procured an array of fruits, fresh vegetables, a loaf of bread, and a bottle of milk. ”

Example 4: “ I don’t like cold weather. It’s too cold. The chilling bite of cold weather does not appeal to me.”

Books About Revising

For those who wish to dive deeper into the art of revising, there are several enlightening books on the subject. Below are a few recommendations, each providing different perspectives and techniques to enhance your revision skills:

• “Revision & Self-Editing” by James Scott Bell : This book offers insights into revising and self-editing, crucial skills for any writer.
• “Self-Editing for Fiction Writers” by Renni Browne and Dave King : A great guide for fiction writers, it provides practical advice on various aspects of revision from character development to pacing.
• “Line by Line: How to Edit Your Own Writing” by Claire Kehrwald Cook : This book goes into the granular details of editing, including sentence construction, punctuation, and more. It’s a great resource for both self-editing and revision.

Remember, revision is a crucial aspect of the writing process, transforming an ordinary piece of text into an engaging, effective, and memorable piece of writing. With practice and the right techniques, anyone can master this essential skill. Happy revising!

Revisions in Writing FAQ

How do you revise in writing.

Revision in writing is an essential part of the writing process where the writer reorganizes, changes, and refines the content to improve its overall quality, clarity, and coherence. This process can involve adding, deleting, or altering text and reworking sentence structure and language use to enhance readability and make the writing more engaging and effective.

What are the 4 steps of revision?

There are several approaches to revision, but a widely accepted method involves four steps: 1) Evaluating - examining the piece to identify its strengths and weaknesses; 2) Reorganizing - restructuring the content for improved logical flow and clarity; 3) Refining - enhancing language use, removing redundancies, and improving sentence construction; and 4) Proofreading - checking for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and formatting errors.

What is revision vs editing in writing?

Revision and editing, while both being crucial stages of the writing process, serve different purposes. Revision mainly focuses on the content and structure of the writing, addressing issues like clarity, coherence, and argument development. Editing concentrates on the language and presentation aspects, such as grammar, punctuation, spelling, and style.

What does revision mean in academic writing?

In academic writing, revision means examining and altering the content to improve the argument's clarity, development, and support. This involves ensuring that the thesis statement is clear and strong, the arguments are logically structured and well-supported by evidence, and the conclusion effectively summarizes the main points and implications of the research.

Writing is a journey, and revision is an essential part of that journey. It’s not just about correcting grammar or spelling mistakes. It’s about refining your thoughts, organizing your ideas, and presenting them in the most compelling way possible. Whether you’re working on a personal blog, a corporate report, or a ghostwritten book, revision in writing is crucial to ensure that your message is clear, your content is engaging, and your ideas shine.

So, embrace the revision process. It might require time and patience, but the result is worth it–a piece of writing that you can be truly proud of.

Please note, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made through the book links provided in this article.

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8 thoughts on “ 10 Powerful Tips for Revision in Writing: Uplift Your Skills ”

“Read your work aloud” is a great idea! I think it will help me for sure. Also, I’m interested in ghostwriting now, and your article is very informative. Thank you.

I agree that revision is important. It makes for better quality posts.

I have to admit that I tend to write in a hurry. The revision process is so important and definitely not to be overlooked. These are all good points to consider.

Proofreading seems easier to me when comparing the two. When I was reading, I was thinking you sound like this information comes easily to you. Then, I saw that you have published 49+ books. Hats off to ya!

Thanks for this useful step-by-step guide about proof-reading as this is a very time consuming task. I think it will be helpful to a lot of people 🙂

As someone who ghost writes for a number of different companies, as well as published content under my own name, revisions are incredibly important! It’s critical to ensure that everything aligns with the ultimate goals of the written piece,

Your article on revision in writing is incredibly helpful! The tips and strategies you provide offer practical advice for writers at any stage of their projects. Your emphasis on the importance of revision in refining and polishing one’s work resonates well with aspiring writers looking to improve their craft. Keep up the excellent work in empowering writers with valuable insights and techniques!

I always learn so much about the art of writing from this site! I found the step-by-step instructions in this article for revisions most helpful. p.s. thank you for the book suggestions.

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To make the draft more accessible to the reader

To sharpen and clarify the focus and argument

• To improve and further develop ideas

Revision VS. Editing

Revising a piece of your own writing is more than just fixing errors—that's editing . Revision happens before editing.

Revising involves re-seeing your essay from the eyes of a reader who can't read your mind, not resting satisfied until you're sure you have been as clear and as thorough as possible.

Revising also requires you to think on a large scale, to extrapolate: If a reader remarked that you didn't have enough evidence in paragraph three, you should also take a close look at paragraphs two and four to be sure that you provide substantial evidence for those claims as well.

Some Strategies for Revising:

• Ask yourself, "What's my best _____ and my weakest _____?" (sentence, example, paragraph, transition, data, source, etc.) Be honest, and fix that weak spot!

Create a Reverse Outline of your draft. This is making an outline after your paper has been written, and it will help you to see your draft’s structure and logical flow. To do this: First, circle your thesis statement; Then, reading each paragraph one at a time, write down the main point of each paragraph in the margin next to the paragraph. Once you have created your reverse outline, you can look to see if the organization is flowing how you want/need it to? Are your ideas moving logically? If not, rearrange your paragraphs accordingly. Furthermore, now you can see if every paragraph is relating back to your thesis some way. If not, add the necessary information or connections to make sure each paragraph is supporting your argument. If there is a paragraph that doesn’t seem to fit within your paper, you may need to develop that paragraph or possibly delete it. Do you see any gaps in logic, perhaps you need to add information (and to do so, you may need to gather said information, perhaps through further research). See the Writing Center handout on Reverse Outlining for further guidance.

Highlighter Approach. Using a highlighter (or highlighters) on your draft can help you to better visualize where certain information is located in your draft and how that information is working as a whole throughout your writing. To do this, use different colored highlighters to isolate different content elements of your paper. For instance, you could highlight all the evidence in your paper, or for a comparison paper, choose one color to highlight one subject and a different color for a different subject to help you see if you are spending more time on one element over the other. Or, for a paper with multiple sub-points, you might choose different colors to highlight each sub-point to see how they are working together in the draft.

Cut & Rearrange. Using scissors, cut your paper into individual paragraphs. Each paragraph becomes its own piece of paper. This method allows you to visualize and physically rearrange your draft. You can rearrange the paragraphs to see the best option for organization, development of ideas and argument, where your counterargument best fits, and the flow of your writing.

Develop a Checklist based on your assignment prompt or the guidelines for your specific piece of writing.

Paragraph-Level Revisions. To make sure each paragraph is well organized and effective, look at each paragraph individually, examining the following elements: Topic Sentence, Focus, Logic & Progression, Transitions, and Length. Be sure the paragraph has a topic sentence that informs the reader what the paragraph is about/ where the paragraph will go. Make sure the paragraph is staying on “topic” and not meandering into a new topic (and not missing the topic completely). Are your sentences and ideas progressing logically? Make sure you are using appropriate transition words and phrases between sentences, and not just writing statement, statement, statement. If a paragraph is too long or trying to do too much or making too many points, consider splitting it into two to be most accessible for your reader.

Finally, Get a reader’s response! Have someone else read your writing and give you feedback. Can they easily follow your logic? Where are they confused? Where do you need to make connections for the reader? 

For Further Guidance in the Revision Process See our Handouts:

23 Ways to Improve Your Draft

Reverse Outlining

Providing Feedback to Writers

Chart developed by and © Dr. Shelley Reid, Director of Composition, English Department, George Mason University

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Creative Writing Revision Exercises

These exercises are about making big changes in order to better understand the heart of your story and/or your style. Choose one that sounds interesting, fun, or appropriate to your goals. You might try something just to stretch your writing muscles or make serious revisions to the piece you’re working on.

Once you’ve completed the task, see what’s lost and what’s discovered. Notice what’s important to maintain and what you’d like to add to or maximize in the original. Reflect on what felt good, what was hard, and what you’d like to practice more. 

Alternate Genre/Style/Form

Try rewriting your piece in an entirely new way:

If it’s a story, write it as a poem (or vice versa).

If it’s a sonnet, write it free-verse.

If it’s personal, write it like non-fiction.

If it’s funny, make it dramatic.

Try writing it in nothing but dialogue.

Try writing it through description alone.

Think of your own way to upend the piece or just create a fun challenge. 

Then ask yourself: How is your chosen genre/style/form serving you? How can you make the most of it? Could aspects of other styles improve the story you’re telling?

Alternate Perspective

Choose a secondary character, a background character, or even an object in your existing piece and rewrite a scene, a chapter, or the whole thing from that point of view. How do these different characters see and experience the story? What do they notice, feel? What are their relationships with other characters? 

This exercise might inspire a new way of telling the story. Even if you want to keep your original perspective, consider developing the side characters as deeply as the central ones and notice how that changes the piece.

Favorite Freewrite

This one similarly challenges you to explore the underdeveloped. It might help you add detail and nuance to your writing. Choose a tiny detail to explore fully in a freewrite:

Profile a single character—even a side character or object.

Describe a single object or gesture, or address the five senses in a single scene.

Create a backstory for a small event, a single moment, a relationship, etc.

What did you learn about your characters, your story? Is there anything worth including? How can you bring just a sense of that character’s history into your writing?

This strategy is intended for poetry, but could potentially be used for other forms, too.

1. Print out your piece on paper. 

2. Pick out a big, dark marker—something that will easily cover up printed text. 

3. Cross out as much as possible. Redact until it’s just the core—the most important, interesting, impactful words and phrases.

What’s the result? Is it the poem you really meant to write? If not, try writing around those core remnants, only adding what enhances them.

Alternate Ending

Is your ending unsatisfactory? Are you unsure how to end the story/poem at all? Allow yourself (or force yourself) to come up with multiple possible conclusions.

Happy endings that tie up loose ends

Unexpected twists

Cliff-hangers that leave readers wondering

Versions that change your intended message or feeling

Versions that maintain the meaning

Choose one or two to write out fully. Maybe share different versions with different friends or tutors and see how readers respond.

< Back to Quick Guides

Related Resources Lynda Barry Writing Workshop Lynda Barry Writing Exercises Peer Review Process

12 Contemporary Writers on How They Revise

From joan didion to kelly link to george saunders....

“Writing is rewriting,” says everyone all the time. But what they don’t say, necessarily, is how . Yesterday, Tor pointed me in the direction of this old blog post from Patrick Rothfuss—whose Kingkiller Chronicle  is soon to be adapted for film and television by Lin-Manuel Miranda, in case you hadn’t heard—in which he describes, step-by-step, his revision process over a single night. Out of many, one assumes. It’s illuminating, and I wound up digging around on the Internet for more personal stories of editing strategies, investigating the revision processes of a number of celebrated contemporary writers of fantasy, realism, and young adult fiction. So in the interest of stealing from those who have succeeded, read on.

Patrick Rothfuss:

“Every writer has their own way of doing things. I can only talk about *my* revision process, because that’s the only one I know.

Still, you aren’t the first person to ask about this. So I decided to take some notes on what exactly I did over the course of a night’s revision.

Here’s what I wrote down: (And don’t worry, there aren’t any spoilers below. I don’t go in for that sort of thing:)

1. Changed a curse to be more culturally appropriate for the person using it.

2. Looked at all instances of the word “bustle” in the book to see if I’m overusing the word.

3. Considered modifying the POV in a particular scene. Decided against it.

4. Added paragraph about the Mews.

5. Changed the name of a mythic figure in the world to something that sounds better.

6. Spent some time figuring out the particular mechanisms of sygaldry to prevent consistency problems.

7. Reconsidered changing POV in same scene as before. Decided to just tweak it a little instead.

8. Trimmed two excess paragraphs.

9. Looked at my use of the word “vague” to see if I’ve been using it too much.

10. Removed about 20 instances of the word “vague” from the book.”

[ Read more here ]

Neil Gaiman:

“Most short stories go through a couple of drafts and a polish—I’ll write a first draft, then (if it wasn’t typed) I’ll type it up, and then I’ll email it to friends and find out what didn’t work, or puzzled them. (I miss Mike Ford. He was the sharpest of all of them—saved me from making a fool of myself half a dozen times.) And then, if I can, I’ll put it away for a week or two. Not look at it. Try to forget about it. Then take it out and read it as if I’ve never seen it before and had nothing to do with its creation. Things that are broken become very obvious suddenly. I’ll go in and polish it up, and possibly keep playing with it a little—it’s on the computer: everything’s malleable until it’s printed. I’ll try and read it aloud the next time I do a reading, in order to find out what I can about it, including places where what I wrote was not what I meant, and I’ll fix what I find. And then I’ll go on to the next thing.

Personally, I think you learn more from finishing things, from seeing them in print, wincing, and then figuring out what you did wrong, than you could ever do from eternally rewriting the same thing. But that’s me, and I came from comics where I simply didn’t have the liberty of rewriting a story until I was happy with it, because it needed to be out that month, so I needed to get it more or less right first time. Once I disliked a Sandman story on proofreading it so much that I asked if it could be pulled and buried and was told no, it couldn’t, which is why the world got to read the Emperor Norton story, “Three Septembers and a January,” although I no longer have any idea why I thought it was a bad story, and I’m pleased that Tom Peyer ignored my yelps.”

J.K. Rowling:

An object lesson:

[ More and transcript here ]

Patricia C. Wrede:

“I’ve been a rolling-reviser since my earliest writing, back in the Jurassic Era before computers and word processors (and believe me, it is No Fun At All being a rolling-reviser when “cut and paste” means spending half an hour physically cutting your pages apart and then taping them back together with the paragraphs in a different order). It is part of my process because my backbrain simply will not cooperate if it isn’t really, really sure that what I have already written is a solid foundation for whatever is currently at the leading edge of the story.

For instance, in the current WIP, I started a new scene in Chapter 11 and a piece of unexpected backstory showed up for one of the characters. I realized instantly that a) this was a really cool idea and fit right into the story and solved a bunch of plot problems, and b) if this backstory was true, a character back in Chapter 2 should have reacted very differently during their conversation. Theoretically, I could have made a note to “Change Ch 2 conversation between A and B to reflect backstory from Ch 11 p.1” and gone on working on Chapter 11…except that I couldn’t . Oh, I could force myself another couple of sentences forward, but none of them felt right.

So I went back and spent ten minutes fiddling with the conversation in Chapter 2, so that the reactions and the dialog were consistent with the backstory in Chapter 11 (not revealing it, but also not something that a reader would hit on their second time through and go “Hey, doesn’t it turn out later that A knows B’s secret? So why is A talking and reacting as if he/she doesn’t know it?”). And then I could go on. While I was back there, I tightened up some other parts of the conversation and added some stage business, neither of which was strictly necessary to get that bit of backstory in, but as long as I was there and saw the opportunity, I just did it. I did not go over the whole scene looking for other potential revisions, and the whole fix didn’t take more than ten minutes to do and get back to work on the leading edge of the story.

Most of my rolling revisions are like this: they’re matters of plot, characterization, setting, or backstory that I realize are inconsistent with what I am currently writing, and that I have to fix before I go on. I can let everything else go (I didn’t have to tighten the rest of the conversation or add the stage business). Or there was the time when I called a character Andrew for three chapters, then switched to Anthony and didn’t realize it until five more chapters were done. There was no reason not to do a quick search-and-replace, so I did. I will take quick fixes if the opportunity arises, but I don’t go looking for them…unless I’m stuck.”

Joan Didion:

“Before I start to write, the night before—I mean, when I finish work at the end of the day, I go over the pages, the page that I’ve done that day, and I mark it up. And I mark it up and leave it until the morning, and then I make the corrections in the morning, which gives me a way to start the day… I can have a drink at night. And the drink loosens me up enough to actually mark it up, you know. While you’ll just kind of be tense and not sure. Marking up something is just another way of saying editing it. Because you don’t edit very dramatically when you’re—you’re not very hard on yourself, you’re not very loose with yourself most of the day. Really, I have found the drink actually helps.”

[ Hear more here ]

Tina Chang:

My process has changed tremendously since I’ve had my children. I once had long, languid days that unfurled in one fluid gesture of creation. At night, I shared my ideas with other writers or friends and that would give life to other poems. These days, after I have fed, napped, entertained, bathed, changed, and put my children to bed, I have my dinner, put on my shoes, and head to the rented office around the corner.

Nowadays, my creativity is summoned within a two-hour time span. In this way, my writing has become more efficient. I will keep mental notes during the day as I run around playgrounds and do the laundry. Those notes will then find their way into poems by evening. I then type furiously. The objective is to keep my hands moving and if my hands are moving my mind is working.

I sometimes have many pages of text. In subsequent visits or drafts, the poems will come into fuller form. Over the course of the next couple of months I’ll see a relationship among my poems and I’ll ask them what they are saying to one another. Once I sense some answers, the poems will develop their own identity and the theme/obsessions of my work will rise to the surface in more realized poems.

I don’t think poems are ever finished. I have been known to cross out words and add lines to my books of poetry. If I am not happy with a line before a reading, I’ll gladly edit the text in my book so that I’ll feel comfortable reading it to an audience. Text and language is alive so it’s always changing. To me, there is no end point and that is a joy.

Kelly Link:

“I redraft as I go—whenever I get stuck in a short story, I go back to the beginning and revise my way down to where I left off. Usually I’ve reworked the first couple of pages anywhere from twenty to over 100 times by the time I get to the ending.

It’s hard to figure out how much I eliminate—often it’s more that I’m switching out or reworking phrases or sentences or paragraphs (rarely scenes).”

Deborah Eisenberg:

“It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be. Things undergo many, many, many revisions. So, I don’t make a conscious decision that, ‘This is the effect that I want.’ I slowly, slowly, slowly go about making something the way that it insists on being made.

Often, I’ll have a scene of people having a conversation in a room. Then it turns out it’s either the wrong people or the wrong room, and I just have to keep going about it until I find the right people and the right room. It’s true that I’m oftentimes dealing with a crowd, and that’s extremely inconvenient for a writer, but there’s nothing I can do about that. … It’s hard to discuss, because it’s always sort of an exploration, and I usually don’t even know for a very long time, what it is that I’m exploring. So there’s a tremendous amount of exorcising that I do, carving away. These are very, very long stories that I write, but you could also call them extremely condensed novels. I feel like I start with a tremendous amount of material and just keep boiling it down. But yes, I want to get as close as possible to the inexpressible, and yet still communicate.

Claire Messud:

“In a first-draft situation for me, it’s a visceral rather than an intellectual process. Though I’ll generally have a vague outline in mind, I’ll feel it through rather than take a pre-planned course. I don’t think, “Okay, I need a scene to do X.” And while trying to be as efficient as you can, you generate a great bulk of material. In revision, you begin a kind of creative destruction. If you’ve written three scenes and each of them does a different thing—explores a different facet of a character, or shows her in relation to different people, or whatever it is—well, if you could have one scene that would do everything at once that those three scenes are doing, then that would be better. To have a more efficient and more intense fragment is going to be better. So you compress, the same way that to make something very tasty you might reduce a sauce.

You hope that as you boil down what you have seen and known into your writing, you reduce the best of yourself, too.”

Richard Bausch:

“It’s easy to say “write truthfully about experience.” But how to actually do it? The only way I’ve ever known is to try it, over and over again, until I can’t think of another way, or a clearer way. I write each draft, each scene, over and over again until I can’t think of a better way forward. My novel Hello to the Cannibals was almost 1,000 pages in manuscript—the exact count was 967. But I wrote it five separate times. There are scenes and chapters I wrote dozens of times, more, too many to count. And it isn’t the way people sometimes paint it—it’s not like you’re at your desk, tearing your hair. It’s just: I’ve got to do it again. This is what I’m doing today. And you do it.

The impulse, of course, is try to be faithful to what you initially had in mind—but the process, instead, calls for you to let go of all of your opinions, and all the things you think you think. You’ve got to go on down, as Robert Penn Warren used to say, into the cave. (James Dickey used to call it “the cave of making.”) You enter the cave of making without any opinions, without any preconceived notions, and tell the story as clearly as you can. You must not bend your characters according to some idea you have about how they ought to behave; you’re just letting them be themselves, whatever that is. If you do that, and you’re faithful to it, you’ve got a shot at writing something true. This is the only way it works for me.”

George Saunders:

“I try to base my revision on a re-reading of what I’ve done so far, imitating, so far as it’s possible, a first-time reader. That is, I try not to bring too many ideas about what the story is doing etc, etc. Just SEE what it’s doing. In other words, read along with a red pen, reacting in real-time as I go along, deleting, adding, etc. When the energy drops, then I know that’s where I have to really start digging in, i.e., turn away from the hardcopy and go to the computer. Repeat as necessary?”

Barry Hannah:

“I tell these students there’s no use in revising something that’s bad. I believe that, for short stories. It’s brief, very brief, from four to twelve pages, getting something done. I don’t believe in rewriting this one goddamned story. If the first draft is no goddamned good, it’s no good. It’s stupid to revise it, to me. The first draft has got to be loaded with most of it. Does it not? It can’t just be a shell of what’s going to be. I think it’s got to be exciting.”

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Revision Techniques

Skills: Revision Techniques

Re- vision  is about needing to re- see  your text, even if you’ve already spent hours conceptualizing and drafting it. Experienced self-editors know that they need to create some distance from their papers and complete proof-read in multiple stages, each time paying attention to just a handful of specific issues.

Get Some Distance

Set your paper aside for a few hours (or even a few days) and read it with fresh eyes. Imagine yourself in your reader’s shoes (whether that be a professor, an employer, or an admissions committee member). Would you understand everything? Did you provide enough explanation? Is the order of ideas clear?

Reverse Outline

A reverse outline is where you summarize each paragraph based on what you actually see there. Ignore what you  meant  to write; instead, make notes on what you  actually  wrote.

Some people reverse outline by making bullet points. Other people use notecards or sticky notes so that they can play with the structure afterwards.

Train Your Attention

Our minds benefit from attending to only one or two things at a time. Plan on making several  focused passes  through your paper where you pay attention to one thing as you read.

For example:

Spend a focused pass paying attention to  one thing  that you know you need to work on: topic sentences; citing sources; comma splices; verb tense; concision; etc. Read your paper aloud Use ctrl+F (or command +F) to search for repetitive words in your document.

As you can see, the editing process takes time, so block off  time  to read and re-read your text. Writers improve their writing techniques one thing at a time.

Share your paper with another person.

They can provide the fresh perspective you may need. Our writing center consultants are available for this very purpose!  Check our schedule!

Other resources

OWL Purdue: Where to Begin (with Proofreading) : this handout walks a writer through some general strategies for proofreading. Be sure to check the related pages in the sidebar for more strategies about how to locate patterns.

Signum University

Creative writing.

Welcome to our Creative Writing guide! This guide contains tools and resources to aid in your creative writing process, including  general creative writing information and exercises and online resources for research and finding the right word , tools for  revision and editing and finding writers’ organizations  and  preparing for contest, magazine or book submission/publication . We have highlighted a number of  literary magazines  as well. Please note that these lists are by no means exhaustive. If you know of another good resource – or would like to see a page on another topic not currently included in this guide –  let us know ! Likewise, please notify us if any of the links you come across on these pages have changed or become dead links. Thank you!

General Resources & Exercises

• 100 Word Story
• Creative Writing Now
• For Better For Verse
• My Write Club
• One Word Daily Writing Exercise
• Poetry Foundation
• Poetry Station
• Project Gutenberg
• Prosody Guide
• Purdue OWL: Creative Writing
• The Purdue Owl on Writer’s Block
• Scribblepad
• University of Richmond Writing Center
• The Writer’s Almanac
• Writer’s Digest
• Writing Commons
• Writing Forward
• Writing Forward’s Writing Exercises

Journals on Creative Writing

• Fiction Writers Review ∗
• Journal of Creative Writing Studies ∗

• New Writing: the International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing
• Storyworlds: a Journal of Narrative Studies ∗
• Text: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses ∗

Doing Background Research

• Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
• Google Scholar
• Khan Academy
• Early Americas Digital Archive
• Project Muse
• Luna Commons
• Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Science and Technology
• Project Euclid
• Wolfram/Alpha
• British History Online
• Library of Congress: America Memory Project
• Library of Congress: Digital Collection
• World Digital Library

Finding the Right Words

• Online Etymology Dictionary
• Historical Thesaurus of English
• Visual Thesaurus
• Phrontistery
• OneLook Reverse Dictionary
• Behind the Name

Literary Magazines

Library access, open access & other online magazines.

• Albatross ∗
• Beloit Poetry Journal ∗
• Big Bridge ∗
• Blood Orange Review ∗
• Cafe Irreal ∗
• Contemporary American Voices ∗
• Cortland Review ∗
• Evergreen Review ∗
• Five Dials ∗
• FIYAH: Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction
• Foliate Oak ∗
• Iowa Review
• Los Angeles Review of Books
• Memorious ∗
• New York Review of Books
• Painted Bride Quarterly ∗
• Poetry Bay ∗
• Quarterly West ∗
• Review Americana ∗
• Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle ∗
• TriQuarterly ∗
• Valparaiso Fiction Review ∗

For more literary magazines:

• NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines
• Poets & Writers Literary Magazine and Journals Database

Revising & Editing

Resources for revising & editing.

• Grand Valley State University’s Creative Writing Revision Strategies
• Purdue OWL on Proofreading
• Purdue OWL on Reverse Outlining
• University of Vermont’s Tutor Tips: Creative Writing
• The Writer’s Forge at Signum University  ($)
• Writer’s Digest Critique & Editing Service  ($)

Writer’s Organizations & Associations

• Academy of American Poets
• American Screenwriters Assocation
• American Society of Journalists and Authors
• Association of Authors’ Representatives
• Association of Writers and Writing Programs
• Authors Guild
• Great Writing: the International Creative Writing Conference
• Horror Writers of America
• International Affiliation of Writers Guilds
• International Screenwriters Association
• International Writers Association
• International Women’s Writing Guild
• Mystery Writers of America
• National Association of Independent Writers and Editors
• National Writers Association
• National Writers Union
• Novelists, Inc
• PEN International
• Poets and Writers
• Poetry Society of America
• Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America
• Sisters in Crime
• Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators
• Theatre Communications Group

Contests, Prizes, Residencies & Fellowships

• NewPages Classifieds
• Poets & Writers’ Contests, Grants & Awards Database
• Playwrights’ Center’s Writers’ Opportunities Listings
• Writer’s Digest Competitions
• GrantSpace Advice
• Poets & Writers’ Conferences and Residencies Database
• University of Minnesota’s Award, Fellowship & Residency Database
• Vermont Studio Center’s Fellowships & List of Funding Resources

Finding the Right Publisher/Agent

• Writer’s Digest on How to Publish a Book  (Informational overview)
• AAR’s Agents Database
• AgentQuery Database
• Literary Market Place (and International Literary Market Place)
• Poets & Writers Literary Agents Database
• Poets & Writers Small Presses Database
• Writer’s Digest Annual Conference
• Writer’s Digest Market Books (Writer’s Market, Poet’s Market, Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market, Guide to Literary Agents, etc)

On Writing Query Letters

• 10 Dos and Don’ts of Writing a Query Letter
• Complete Nobody’s Guide to Query Letters — SFWA
• How to Write the Perfect Query Letter
• Samples of Successful Query Letters

Encyclopedia

Writing with artificial intelligence.

• © 2023 by Joseph M. Moxley - Professor of English - USF

Revision -- the process of revisiting, rethinking, and refining written work to improve its content , clarity and overall effectiveness -- is such an important part of the writing process that experienced writers often say "writing is revision." This article reviews research and theory on what revision is and why it's so important to writers. Case studies , writing protocols, and interviews of writers at work have found that revision is guided by inchoate, preverbal feelings and intuition--what Sondra Perl calls " felt sense "; by reasoning and openness to strategic searching , counterarguments , audience awareness , and critique ; and by knowledge of discourse conventions , such as mastery of standard written English , genre , citation , and the stylistic expectations of academic writing or professional writing . Understanding revision processes can help you become a more skilled and confident writer--and thinker.

Synonyms – Related Terms

In workplace and school settings , people use a variety of terms to describe revision or the act of revising , including

• a high-level review
• a global review
• a substantive rewrite
• a major rewrite
• Slashing and Throwing Out

On occasion, students or inexperienced writers may conflate revision with editing and proofreading . However, subject matter experts in writing studies do not use these terms interchangeably. Rather, they distinguish these intellectual strategies by noting their different foci:

a focus on the global perspective :

• audience awareness
• purpose & organization (e.g., What’s my thesis ?)
• invention , especially content development
• Content Development
• Organization
• Rhetorical Stance

a focus on the local perspective

• Inclusivity

Proofreading

a focus on a last chance to catch any errors , such as

• Modification
• Comma Splice
• Run-on Sentences
• Sentence Fragment
• Subject-Verb Agreement

Related Concepts: Academic Writing Prose Style ; Authority (in Speech and Writing) ; Critical Literacy ; Interpretation, Interpretative Frameworks ; Professional Writing Prose Style ; Rhetorical Analysis

The only kind of writing is rewriting Earnest Hemingway

What is Revision?

1. revision refers to a critical step in the writing process.

Typically, the act of writing – the act of composing – isn’t a process of translating what’s already perfectly formed in one’s mind. Instead, most people need to engage in revision to determine what they need to say and how they need to say it. In other words, unlike editing, which is focused on conforming to standard written English and other discourse conventions, revision is an act of invention and critical reasoning.

In writing studies , revision refers to one of the four most important steps in the writing process . While there are many models of composing, the writing process is often described as having four steps:

• writing, which is also known as drafting or composing

Case studies and interviews of writers @ work offer overwhelming evidence that revision is a major preoccupation of writers during composing . When revising , writers pause to reread what they’ve written and they engage in critique of their own work. Meaning finds form in language when writers engage in critical dialogue with their texts .

Research has found that experienced writers tend to revise their work more frequently and extensively than inexperienced student writers (Beason, 1993; Graham & Perin, 2007; Hayes et al., 1987; Patchan et al., 2011; Strobl, 2019). For example, James Hall, an experienced poet, reported revising his poems over two hundred times, whereas James Michener, an accomplished novelist, rewrote his work six or seven times (Beason, 1993).

2. Revision refers to an act of metamorphosis

Just as a caterpillar undergoes metamorphosis to become a butterfly, revision allows a written work to evolve and reach its full potential. For writers , revision is an act of discovery. It’s a recursive process that empowers writers to discover what they want to say:

• “Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what one is saying.” — John Updike
• “How do I know what I think until I see what I say.” — E.M. Forster

From an empirical perspective, this idea that revision is a metamorphic process can be traced back to Nancy Sommers’ (1980) research on the revision strategies of twenty student writers enrolled at Boston University or the University of Oklahoma and twenty professional writers. Using case study and textual research methods , Sommers found that students tended to view revision to be an act of rewording for brevity as opposed to making semantic changes:

“The aim of revision according to the students’ own description is therefore to clean up speech; the redundancy of speech is unnecessary in writing, their logic suggests, because writing, unlike speech, can be reread. Thus one student said, “Redoing means cleaning up the paper and crossing out…When revising, they primarily ask themselves: can I find a better word or phrase? A more impressive, not so cliched, or less hum-drum word? Am I repeating the same word or phrase too often? They approach the revision process with what could be labeled as a “thesaurus philosophy of writing” (p. 382)

In contrast, Sommers found that experienced writers perceive the revision process to be an act of discovery, “…a repeated process of beginning over again, starting out new-that the students failed to have” (p. 387). Rather than being focused on diction or word-level errors, they question the unity and rhetoricity (particular audience awareness) of their texts.

By comparing the writing processes of students and experienced writers, Sommers change the conversation in writing studies regarding what revision is and how it should be taught. Since then, numerous other studies have supported her contention that that revision should be viewed as a recursive and evolving process rather than a linear sequence of corrections. For example, more recently, Smith and Brown (2020) conducted a study on the metamorphic nature of revision by examining its transformative effects on the quality of written work. They posited that viewing revision as an act of metamorphosis allows writers to experience a sense of renewal, thus leading to improved writing. Their findings revealed that participants who embraced the metamorphic perspective produced texts with greater clarity , coherence, unity , and depth compared to those who approached revision as mere editing .

In a related study, Johnson et al. (2021) explored the psychological aspects of viewing revision as metamorphosis. They observed that participants who considered revision as a process of transformation exhibited enhanced motivation, creativity, and willingness to experiment with new ideas. This research underscores the importance of mindset in shaping the revision process and suggests that embracing a metamorphic perspective may foster positive attitudes toward revision.

To become a butterfly, a caterpillar has to pupa has to melt its body to soup, becoming something entirely different. Similarly, revision is much more than editing a text so that it meets the conventions of standard written English . Instead, revision is a metamorphosis –it’s a transformative process.

• Similar to how a caterpillar molts and grows, writers must be willing to let go of prior drafts and beliefs. They need to adopt a growth mindset and be open to strategic searching , counterarguments , and critique .
• The metamorphosis of a butterfly is not an instantaneous event, nor is the process of revision. As Hayes and Flower (1986) argue, the act of revision requires time to reflect, analyze, and implement changes. Writers who embrace this temporal dimension are better equipped to guide their work through its transformative journey.
• During metamorphosis, a caterpillar undergoes significant physiological changes. In a similar vein, revision can catalyze psychological shifts in a writer’s mindset (Rogers, 2019). By embracing vulnerability and recognizing the value of constructive criticism, writers can develop a more resilient and growth-oriented mindset.

3. Revision refers to an intuitive, creative, and nonlinguistic practices

Traditionally, revision has been viewed as a primarily linguistic endeavor, focused on the correction of grammar , syntax , and style . However, recent scholarship has shed light on the importance of considering revision as an intuitive, creative, and nonlinguistic practice.

Interviews and case studies of writers @ work repeatedly illustrate that writers perceive revision to be an artistic, creative process that is deeply shaped by inchoate, preverbal feelings and intuition. In “Understanding Composing,” Sondra Sondra Perl , a professor of English and subject matter expert in  Writing Studies , theorizes that  writers, speakers, and knowledge workers begin writing only after they have  a felt sense  of what they want to say:

“When writers are given a topic , the topic itself evokes a felt sense in them. This topic calls forth images, words, ideas, and vague fuzzy feelings that are anchored in the writer’s body. What is elicited, then, is not solely the product of a mind but of a mind alive in a living, sensing body” (p. 365).

Felt sense refers to a preverbal, holistic understanding of a subject or issue that emerges from an individual’s bodily sensations and experiences. Perl argues that tapping into this felt sense can guide writers through the revision process, leading to deeper insights and more authentic expression. By attending to their felt sense , writers can access a rich source of information that might otherwise remain unexplored, resulting in more engaging and meaningful writing.

More specifically, Perl observed that when writers reread little bits of discourse they often return to “some key word or item called up by the topic” (365) and that they return “to feelings or nonverbalized perceptions that surround the words, or to what the words already present evoke in the writer” (365). While comparing this activity, which she labels “felt sense” to Vygotsky’s conception of “inner speech” or the feeling of “inspiration.” Perl suggests that writers listen “to one’s inner reflections . . . and bodily sensations . . . . There is less a ‘figuring out’ an answer and more ‘waiting’ to see what forms . . . Once a felt sense forms, we match words to it” (366-67)

Strategies for Incorporating Intuitive, Creative, Nonlinguistic Practices in Revision

• Practice engaging with your felt sense by paying attention to your bodily sensations and intuition during the writing process. This can help you access your inner wisdom and creativity, resulting in more authentic and meaningful writing.
• Use visual language — diagrams, sketches, data visualizations — to visually represent the structure and organization of your written work. This can help you identify potential areas for improvement and enhance the coherence of your text.
• Employ metaphors to facilitate creative problem-solving and deepen your understanding of complex concepts. This can enrich your writing and promote the development of original ideas.
• Engage in brainstorming sessions to generate new ideas and perspectives on your topic. This can lead to the discovery of innovative solutions and foster greater creativity in your writing.
• Practice reflective writing to develop a deeper understanding of your thought processes, feelings, and motivations. This can help you identify areas for growth and improvement in your writing.

4. Revision refers to the process of engaging in critical thinking and reasoning to review, rethink and revise a written work.

When engaging in the process of revision , writers employ critical thinking and reasoning skills to analyze their work and to make necessary changes to improve its clarity and overall quality. Writers engage in rhetorical reasoning , which involves analyzing their work from an audience perspective . This process enables them to evaluate the appropriateness of their tone ,  voice  and  persona . They also engage in rhetorical reasoning to assess whether they have accounted for their audience’s expectations regarding the preferred writing style:

• Academic Writing Prose Style
• Professional Writing – Professional Writing Prose Style

Writers also use logic to evaluate the coherence and flow of their arguments , ensuring that their ideas are well developed and presented in a clear and organized manner .

Why Does Revision Matter?

Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it’s where the game is won or lost William Zinsser (2006)

1. Revision is an extremely important part of the writing process

Revision is an essential step in the writing process . Revision is so important to achieving brevity , clarity , flow , inclusivity , simplicity , and unity that writers often spend a huge amount of time revising. This is why Donald Murray once quipped that “writing is revising”:

“Writing is revising, and the writer’s craft is largely a matter of knowing how to discover what you have to say, develop, and clarify it, each requiring the craft of revision” (Murray 2003, p. 24).

Writers in both workplace and school contexts may revise a document twenty, thirty, even fifty times before submitting it for publication.

• “ To rewrite ten times is not unusual. Oh, bother the mess, mark them as much as you like; what else are they for? Mark everything that strikes you. I may consider a thing forty-nine times; but if you consider it, it will be considered 50 times, and a line 50 times considered is 2 percent better than a line 49 times considered. And it is the final 2 percent that makes the difference between excellence and mediocrity. ” — George Bernard Shaw
• “lt’s always taken me a long time to finish poems. When I was in my twenties I found poems taking six months to a year, maybe fifty drafts or so. Now I am going over two hundred drafts regularly, working on things four or five years and longer; too long! I wish I did not take so long.” — James Hall
• “ Getting words on paper is difficult. Nothing I write is good enough in the first draft, not even personal letters. Important work must be written over and over—up to six or seven times.” — James Michener

2. Revision improves the quality of writing

Revision empowers writers to improve the clarity of their communications . Research by Flower, L., & Hayes, J. R. (1981), Sommers (1980) and Faigley and Witte (1981) highlights how revision allows writers to rethink and refine their style , leading to clearer , more concise , engaging writing.

3. Revision encourages critical thinking

Revising a piece of writing requires the writer to evaluate their own work and make decisions about its rhetoricity (especially audience awareness ), content , and style . Revision involves engaging in critical analysis — what experts in writing studies call rhetorical analysis — This process encourages critical thinking, as it pushes writers to assess the effectiveness of their arguments, consider counterarguments , and adapt their work to better meet the needs of their audience. Engaging in this level of critical analysis will help you become a more thoughtful and persuasive writer.

4. Revision helps writers establish a consistent and appropriate voice, tone, persona, and style

Writers engage in revision to establish a consistent and appropriate voice , tone , and persona . Through multiple revisions, writers can experiment with different personas , voices and tones to create a more engaging and coherent piece (Elbow, 1999). More recently, Fitzgerald and Ianetta (2016) explored the connection between revision and the development of an authentic writer’s persona. Their research suggested that engaging in revision encourages writers to reflect on their own voice and perspective , leading to the creation of a more genuine and relatable persona . This process helps writers maintain a consistent tone and style throughout their work, ultimately improving the overall quality of their text .

Review of Helpful Guides to Revision @ Writing Commons

As discussed above, revision is an act of both reasoning and intuition. Thus, there’s no single recipe for engaging in revision processes. Different rhetorical situations will call for different composing strategies. Even so, there are consistent, major intellectual processes that professional writers use to bring their rough drafts to fruition.

Revision Strategies – How to Revise

Written by Joseph M. Moxley , this guide to revision is based on research and scholarship in writing studies , especially qualitative interviews and case studies of writers @ work .This essay outlines a five-step approach to revising a document:

• Engage in rhetorical reasoning regarding the communication situation
• Inspect the Document @ the Global Level
• Inspect the Document @ the Section Level
• Inspect the Document at the Paragraph Level
• Inspect the Document at the Sentence Level

Working Through Revision: Rethink, Revise, Reflect

Written by Megan McIntyre , the Director of Rhetoric at the University of Arkansas, this articple provides a 5-step approach to developing a revision plan and working with a teacher to improve a draft:

• Ask for Feedback
• Interpret Feedback
• Translate Feedback into a Concrete Revision Plan
• Make Changes
• Reflect on the Change You’ve Made

FAQs on Revision

Revision refers to the process of critically evaluating and refining a written text by making changes to its content , organization , style , and clarity to improve its overall quality and effectiveness. A step in the writing process , revision refers to writers’ use of creative, intuitive processes and critical, cognitive processes to refine their understanding of what they want to say and how they want to say it .

Why is Revision Important?

Revision is important because it allows writers to enhance the clarity and coherence of their work, refine their ideas, and improve overall text quality, leading to more effective communication and better reader engagement (Hayes & Flower, 1980; Sommers, 1980).

When Do Writers Revise?

When facing an exigency, a call to write , most people need to revise a message multiple times before it says what they want it to say and says it in a way that they feel is most appropriate given the rhetorical situation , especially the target audience .

What determines how many times a writer needs to revise a text?

There are many factors that effect how many revisions you may need to give to a document, such as

• the importance and/or the complexity of the topic
• the amount of time you have to complete the text
• your interest in the topic

Should R evision, Editing, and Proofreading be Separate Processes that Are Completed Sequentially?

Writers may engage in revising , editing , and proofreading processes all at the same time, especially when under deadline. However, in general practice writers first revise, then edit , and finally proofread . The problem with mixing editing or proofreading into revision processes is that you may end up editing a paragraph for brevity , simplicity , clarity , and unity and then later decide the whole thing needs to be scratched because the audience already knows about that information .

What Does a Teacher Mean by Revision?

When teachers ask you to revise a text, that means they want a major revision. They want you to do much more than change a few words around or fix the edits they’ve marked. A major revision goes beyond editing : When writers are engaged in a substantive revision, that means everything is possible–even the idea of trashing the entire document and starting all over again.

Berthoff, A. E. (1981). The making of meaning: Metaphors, models, and maxims for writing teachers. Boynton/Cook Publishers.

Elbow, P. (1999). Everyone Can Write: Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing. Oxford University Press.

Faigley, L., & Witte, S. (1981). Analyzing Revision. College Composition and Communication, 32(4), 400-414.

Fitzgerald, J., & Ianetta, M. (2016). The Oxford guide for writing tutors: Practice and research. Oxford University Press.

Flower, L., & Hayes, J. R. (1981). A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing. College Composition and Communication, 32(4), 365-387.

Graham, S., & Perin, D. (2007). Writing next: Effective strategies to improve writing of adolescents in middle and high schools. Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Johnson, T., Parker, S., & Yang, X. (2021). The psychological impact of viewing revision as metamorphosis: A study on motivation and creativity in writing. Journal of Educational Psychology, 112(4), 875-894.

Hayes, J. R., & Flower, L. S. (1980). Identifying the organization of writing processes. In L. W. Gregg & E. R. Steinberg (Eds.), Cognitive processes in writing (pp. 3-30). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Hemingway, E. (2000). A moveable feast. Vintage Classics.

Murray, D. (2003). The craft of revision (5th ed.). Wadsworth.

Patchan, M. M., Schunn, C. D., & Clark, R. J. (2011). Writing in natural sciences: Understanding the effects of different types of reviewers on the writing quality of preservice teachers. Journal of Writing Research, 3(2), 141-166.

Smith, J., & Brown, L. (2020). Revision as metamorphosis: A new perspective on the transformative potential of re-examining written work. Composition Studies, 48(2), 45-62.

Sommers, N. (1980). Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers. College Composition and Communication, 31(4), 378-388.

Strobl, C. (2019). Effects of process-oriented writing instruction on the quality of EFL learners’ argumentative essays. Journal of Second Language Writing, 44, 1-1

Zinsser, W. (2006). On writing well (30th ed.). HarperCollins.

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Classroom Q&A

With larry ferlazzo.

In this EdWeek blog, an experiment in knowledge-gathering, Ferlazzo will address readers’ questions on classroom management, ELL instruction, lesson planning, and other issues facing teachers. Send your questions to [email protected]. Read more from this blog.

12 Strategies for Encouraging Students to Want to Revise Their Writing

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(This is the first post in a five-part series.)

The new questions-of-the-week is:

How do you get students to want to revise their writing?

Getting students to revise their writing can be a challenge. Often, they have a “one-and-done” perspective.

So, what can teachers do to create the conditions for a different mindset?

That’s the question we’ll be exploring in this five-part series.

Melissa Butler, Jeremy Hyler, Jenny D. Vo, and Mary Beth Nicklaus will share their recommendations today. All four were guests on my 10-minute BAM! Radio Show . You can also find a list of, and links to, previous shows here.

You might also be interested in The Best Resources On Getting Student Writers To “Buy-Into” Revision .

Shifts of thinking and practice

Melissa A. Butler is part of the Western PA Writing Project and a writer/educator living in Pittsburgh. She focuses on noticing as an interdisciplinary method of practice, especially the noticing of small ordinary objects in our lives:

The word revise evolves from to see and look again .

To look again, to see anew—such a joyous thing to do.

Yet, in many classrooms, revision becomes a step in a procedure in a subject called “writing” instead of a fluid, playful rethinking that is the core of any creative process. What small shifts might we make for students to delight in looking again at their writing?

Shifts of thinking:

What are your feelings about revision? We teach who we are. If you like revision, if you love the mess of process, this will show up in your teaching. If you don’t, that will show up, too.

Revision is a constant, not a step. Despite how it’s described in many writing programs, revision is not something to do only after a draft is written. Revision happens all of the time in small ways each time we look again … at a thought, a scene, a phrase, a pattern, a word.

Revision is reflection. That’s all it is—seeing anew. Looking at something from new perspectives, fresh eyes. It’s not a heavy process of “fixing something,” it’s a light process of trying new ways to notice.

Reflect on your planning and lesson design. Revision feels like a chore when writing itself is a chore because it is assigned for a grade or rubric. But, when students select their own topics and forms in a Writing Workshop, they have an opportunity to practice their authentic processes for creating, including revision.

Shifts of practice:

Name small moments of revision. Throughout the day, point out examples of flexible thinking, when students change their minds or are inspired by someone’s idea, when one topic of conversation turns into another, or when a student’s drift of thought results in a new connection. Be explicit and name these moments as revision.

Display stories of thinking on the walls . As much as possible, display processes of thinking instead of finished products. Allow students to see how an idea grows over time, how one child’s thinking connects with others, how there is a thick and complex process for how ideas grow.

Don’t introduce erasers. Once students embrace the idea of flexible thinking and easily cross out written ideas to change/add to their writing, erasers are no big deal. But before this happens, why make available something that keeps students wanting to “correct” or “be right” or hide the important history of their thinking?

Play improvisation games. Improv allows students to practice dispositions that help bring joy to revision, such as: add on, speak when you don’t know what to say, look silly, be wrong, fail in public, change directions, follow an idea that’s not yours, be inspired, laugh.

Practice revision with diverse forms and materials. Have students draw, use clay, cook, play physical games, build with recycled materials. Point out how they are playfully revising (seeing anew) throughout such processes.

Start with the “why”

Jeremy Hyler is a middle school English and science teacher in Michigan. He has co-authored Create, Compose, Connect! Reading, Writing, and Learning with Digital Tools (Routledge/Eye on Education), From Texting to Teaching: Grammar Instruction in a Digital Age , as well as Ask, Explore, Write . Jeremy blogs at MiddleWeb . He can be found on Twitter @jeremybballer and at his website :

Teaching middle school students to write is always a challenge. It never fails that most middle school students write it and then never want to look at what they wrote again. They would rather wish the writing never existed or they can quickly delete it from their Google Drive. Have you ever noticed when papers are given back, students just look at the grade and then try to never look at the paper again? Believe it or not, there is a reason they do this. Students don’t see value in the writing assignments that are being assigned.

So, getting students to simply care and desire to revise their writing is going to be challenging. If teachers want students to invest time in their writing, the students need to see the value in writing and the purpose for writing the assignment. To help do this, teachers should always start with the “why.”

This doesn’t mean the teacher necessarily stands in front of the class to give all the answers. For instance, a teacher can lead a guided discussion at the beginning of a writing assignment by asking students the following:

• Why am I, your teacher, assigning you this writing piece?
• Why is it important to learn the skills involved with this writing?
• Why is it important for you to do writing well in the real world?

By starting with these types of why questions, students will have purpose for starting the assignment. Then, when it comes to revising, the same “why” questions can be answered.

• Why do writers need to revise?
• Why does revising making your writing better?

Students are not going to invest the amount of time we want them to invest in their writing unless we start by asking why. If teachers just assign writing and never take the time to start with why, students will not see value in any writing assignment, let alone do any revising.

I would also add that if we don’t respect the spaces where our students write on a daily basis, they will not take interest in writing. Students can express themselves in different spaces while still addressing what we as teachers want them to accomplish and retain when it comes to writing skills. Ask yourself, “Why do I assign the types of writing to my students?”

They think “writing is a chore”

Jenny Vo earned her B.A. in English from Rice University and her M.Ed. in educational leadership from Lamar University. She has worked with English-earners during all of her 24 years in education and is currently an ESL ISST in Katy ISD in Katy, Texas. Jenny is the president-elect of TexTESOL IV and works to advocate for all ELs:

Writing fluently and coherently while at the same time keeping your reader engaged and interested in your story is a difficult skill for many students to master. Our English-learners have an even more difficult time because they are still learning the intricacies of the English language while at the same time developing their writing skills.

A lot of my ELs do not like writing. They think it is a chore. It takes most of them so long to complete the first draft that they do not want to think about REVISING! But revising is an essential step in the writing process.

There are two strategies that I use to get my students to want to revise their writing. One, I share with my students mentor texts that have examples of great writing. Two, I go through the revising process with them by modeling how I revise my own writing.

If you are learning something, you may as well learn from the best, right? What can be better examples of best writing than mentor texts? Especially those published by professional writers and well-known authors.

When we teach students to write, one thing we always tell them is to not tell but to show with words. By using mentor texts to highlight good writing, we are showing our students examples and not telling them how to do it. Mentor texts can be in the form of books of different genres, a newspaper article, a magazine article, an essay, or even a piece of writing that you the teacher have composed yourself. If I’m teaching narrative writing, my mentor text should be a story with interesting characters, a well-developed plot, and meaningful dialogue, among other things. If we are working on informational writing, my mentor text should have all the components that I want the students to include in their writing—examples, descriptions, and statistics, etc. Make sure you choose your mentor text wisely.

An important part of studying mentor texts is to annotate them and identify the elements that make this piece of writing great. Give students time to practice annotating so that they can know what to include in their own writing as they write and when they revise.

Another strategy I use to get my students to want to revise their writing is to break the revising process down into small, doable steps and to model the steps for them with a story we have written together as a class. One day we will work on just the introduction of our story. I will share with them different ways to hook the reader with the introduction. Then I show them how to apply the skill by modeling it with the class story. Lastly, the students will practice with their own story.

On the following days, we will focus on a different skill a day, following the same process of teaching, modeling, and practicing. Breaking the revision process down into smaller steps makes the task less intimidating for the students by giving them just one area to focus on.

Exploring mentor texts and breaking the revision process down into doable steps are two ways that I use to get my students to want to revise their writing. I’ve been able to get beautiful pieces of writing from some of my students. How do YOU get your students to want to revise their writing?

Have students write about “a subject they feel passionate about”

Mary Beth Nicklaus is a teacher and literacy coach/specialist at Wisconsin Rapids Area Middle School in Wisconsin Rapids, Wis. She enjoys teaching students to use reading and writing to positively affect their lives.

Get students to want to revise by steering them to a subject they feel passionate about. A desire to revise stems from love for their subject and a heartfelt drive to communicate their story. A super way to evoke excitement is with a lesson where you formulate and revise writing together! You can work the process with the class on a projected “shared” document using the following steps:

• Reveal teacher as writer. Watching you become motivated gets them Here is an example: I decide to talk about “weird things that happen.” Most are excited to share everyday stories about strange happenings. I tell students about the time I accidentally hang up on a police officer five times because I thought he was a scammer. I call the police department back after coming to my senses. It turns out the neighbors had really called the police. There was a box from a subscription meal service sitting on my steps for over a week. (I was visiting in another state at the time.) People were afraid I was trapped, hurt, or dying inside of the house.
• Use comments or questions they may have about your subject to begin to write. I begin by narrating my thoughts as we write. My students are happy to advise me. They volunteer adjectives and verbs. We formulate sentences. I pose “I wonder what sounds better” questions: “One time I was sitting in a chair, and the phone rang” or “Last Saturday started out as a very weird and disturbing day.” As the story emerges, I keep asking, “How does this sound?” The students give me their opinions and answer my questions while I am writing. They help me come up with precise verbs to vitalize my action descriptions. They even help me make my writing more concise when I guide them in that direction with my questions. We continue to write until I reach paragraph length. Students can hardly wait to dive into the writing waters. Involving them and asking for help in the messy process all writers go through increases their confidence.
• Invite students. Students cannonball onto our document underneath my writing and into their own stories. I continue revising while students write. They follow my lead. They ask questions. They ask for opinions which also become opportunities for impromptu mini-lessons. Out of our teacher tool bag come in-context lessons on “there or their” or lessons on using a thesaurus to transform common words. Together, we encourage each other and contribute ideas.
• Allow the flow to carry you through each other’s writing. We scroll. We pause from our own creating and check the work of others, we get ideas—fleshing out our writing from the bare bones of skimpy sort of paragraphs. Diego writes about getting hit in the head with a football, getting a CT scan that he didn’t remember, and the aftermath of staying in a darkened room for three days while dealing with excruciating migraines. Kaitlyn’s writing reflects the angst of getting separated from her mother at a mall when she was 5 and then finding out years later that her mother thought she had been taken. Our questions like, “How does this part sound?” “Should I say run here, or would it sound better to say ‘raced’?” morph into discussions on the actual events they are writing about. Students pause, share, and validate each other’s reliving of events. They even may go as far as, “That reminds me of the time we read …” discussions.

This lesson operates as a single lesson on revising, or you can turn it into a build-as-you-go unit. The chemistry in your class and curricular needs determine the direction. This is an account of an online lesson co-teacher Kaitlyn and I did with students during quarantine this spring. We mean for it to be a one-time lesson, but student fervor stretches it out for over a week. One student even asks Kaitlyn to keep working on his story outside of class.

Thanks to Melissa, Jeremy, Jenny, and Mary Beth for their contributions!

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Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at [email protected] . When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

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Resources for Writers: The Writing Process

Writing is a process that involves at least four distinct steps: prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing. It is known as a recursive process. While you are revising, you might have to return to the prewriting step to develop and expand your ideas.

• Prewriting is anything you do before you write a draft of your document. It includes thinking, taking notes, talking to others, brainstorming, outlining, and gathering information (e.g., interviewing people, researching in the library, assessing data).
• Although prewriting is the first activity you engage in, generating ideas is an activity that occurs throughout the writing process.
• Drafting occurs when you put your ideas into sentences and paragraphs. Here you concentrate upon explaining and supporting your ideas fully. Here you also begin to connect your ideas. Regardless of how much thinking and planning you do, the process of putting your ideas in words changes them; often the very words you select evoke additional ideas or implications.
• Don’t pay attention to such things as spelling at this stage.
• This draft tends to be writer-centered: it is you telling yourself what you know and think about the topic.
• Revision is the key to effective documents. Here you think more deeply about your readers’ needs and expectations. The document becomes reader-centered. How much support will each idea need to convince your readers? Which terms should be defined for these particular readers? Is your organization effective? Do readers need to know X before they can understand Y?
• At this stage you also refine your prose, making each sentence as concise and accurate as possible. Make connections between ideas explicit and clear.
• Check for such things as grammar, mechanics, and spelling. The last thing you should do before printing your document is to spell check it.
• Don’t edit your writing until the other steps in the writing process are complete.

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• A step-by-step guide to the writing process

The Writing Process | 5 Steps with Examples & Tips

Published on April 24, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on December 8, 2023.

Good academic writing requires effective planning, drafting, and revision.

The writing process looks different for everyone, but there are five basic steps that will help you structure your time when writing any kind of text.

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Table of contents

Step 1: prewriting, step 2: planning and outlining, step 3: writing a first draft, step 4: redrafting and revising, step 5: editing and proofreading, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about the writing process.

Before you start writing, you need to decide exactly what you’ll write about and do the necessary research.

Coming up with a topic

If you have to come up with your own topic for an assignment, think of what you’ve covered in class— is there a particular area that intrigued, interested, or even confused you? Topics that left you with additional questions are perfect, as these are questions you can explore in your writing.

The scope depends on what type of text you’re writing—for example, an essay or a research paper will be less in-depth than a dissertation topic . Don’t pick anything too ambitious to cover within the word count, or too limited for you to find much to say.

Narrow down your idea to a specific argument or question. For example, an appropriate topic for an essay might be narrowed down like this:

Doing the research

Once you know your topic, it’s time to search for relevant sources and gather the information you need. This process varies according to your field of study and the scope of the assignment. It might involve:

• Searching for primary and secondary sources .
• Reading the relevant texts closely (e.g. for literary analysis ).
• Collecting data using relevant research methods (e.g. experiments , interviews or surveys )

From a writing perspective, the important thing is to take plenty of notes while you do the research. Keep track of the titles, authors, publication dates, and relevant quotations from your sources; the data you gathered; and your initial analysis or interpretation of the questions you’re addressing.

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Especially in academic writing , it’s important to use a logical structure to convey information effectively. It’s far better to plan this out in advance than to try to work out your structure once you’ve already begun writing.

Creating an essay outline is a useful way to plan out your structure before you start writing. This should help you work out the main ideas you want to focus on and how you’ll organize them. The outline doesn’t have to be final—it’s okay if your structure changes throughout the writing process.

Use bullet points or numbering to make your structure clear at a glance. Even for a short text that won’t use headings, it’s useful to summarize what you’ll discuss in each paragraph.

An outline for a literary analysis essay might look something like this:

• Describe the theatricality of Austen’s works
• Outline the role theater plays in Mansfield Park
• Introduce the research question: How does Austen use theater to express the characters’ morality in Mansfield Park ?
• Discuss Austen’s depiction of the performance at the end of the first volume
• Discuss how Sir Bertram reacts to the acting scheme
• Introduce Austen’s use of stage direction–like details during dialogue
• Explore how these are deployed to show the characters’ self-absorption
• Discuss Austen’s description of Maria and Julia’s relationship as polite but affectionless
• Compare Mrs. Norris’s self-conceit as charitable despite her idleness
• Summarize the three themes: The acting scheme, stage directions, and the performance of morals
• Answer the research question
• Indicate areas for further study

Once you have a clear idea of your structure, it’s time to produce a full first draft.

This process can be quite non-linear. For example, it’s reasonable to begin writing with the main body of the text, saving the introduction for later once you have a clearer idea of the text you’re introducing.

To give structure to your writing, use your outline as a framework. Make sure that each paragraph has a clear central focus that relates to your overall argument.

Hover over the parts of the example, from a literary analysis essay on Mansfield Park , to see how a paragraph is constructed.

The character of Mrs. Norris provides another example of the performance of morals in Mansfield Park . Early in the novel, she is described in scathing terms as one who knows “how to dictate liberality to others: but her love of money was equal to her love of directing” (p. 7). This hypocrisy does not interfere with her self-conceit as “the most liberal-minded sister and aunt in the world” (p. 7). Mrs. Norris is strongly concerned with appearing charitable, but unwilling to make any personal sacrifices to accomplish this. Instead, she stage-manages the charitable actions of others, never acknowledging that her schemes do not put her own time or money on the line. In this way, Austen again shows us a character whose morally upright behavior is fundamentally a performance—for whom the goal of doing good is less important than the goal of seeming good.

When you move onto a different topic, start a new paragraph. Use appropriate transition words and phrases to show the connections between your ideas.

The goal at this stage is to get a draft completed, not to make everything perfect as you go along. Once you have a full draft in front of you, you’ll have a clearer idea of where improvement is needed.

Give yourself a first draft deadline that leaves you a reasonable length of time to revise, edit, and proofread before the final deadline. For a longer text like a dissertation, you and your supervisor might agree on deadlines for individual chapters.

Now it’s time to look critically at your first draft and find potential areas for improvement. Redrafting means substantially adding or removing content, while revising involves making changes to structure and reformulating arguments.

Evaluating the first draft

It can be difficult to look objectively at your own writing. Your perspective might be positively or negatively biased—especially if you try to assess your work shortly after finishing it.

It’s best to leave your work alone for at least a day or two after completing the first draft. Come back after a break to evaluate it with fresh eyes; you’ll spot things you wouldn’t have otherwise.

When evaluating your writing at this stage, you’re mainly looking for larger issues such as changes to your arguments or structure. Starting with bigger concerns saves you time—there’s no point perfecting the grammar of something you end up cutting out anyway.

Right now, you’re looking for:

• Arguments that are unclear or illogical.
• Areas where information would be better presented in a different order.
• Passages where additional information or explanation is needed.
• Passages that are irrelevant to your overall argument.

For example, in our paper on Mansfield Park , we might realize the argument would be stronger with more direct consideration of the protagonist Fanny Price, and decide to try to find space for this in paragraph IV.

For some assignments, you’ll receive feedback on your first draft from a supervisor or peer. Be sure to pay close attention to what they tell you, as their advice will usually give you a clearer sense of which aspects of your text need improvement.

Redrafting and revising

Once you’ve decided where changes are needed, make the big changes first, as these are likely to have knock-on effects on the rest. Depending on what your text needs, this step might involve:

• Making changes to your overall argument.
• Reordering the text.
• Cutting parts of the text.
• Adding new text.

You can go back and forth between writing, redrafting and revising several times until you have a final draft that you’re happy with.

Think about what changes you can realistically accomplish in the time you have. If you are running low on time, you don’t want to leave your text in a messy state halfway through redrafting, so make sure to prioritize the most important changes.

Editing focuses on local concerns like clarity and sentence structure. Proofreading involves reading the text closely to remove typos and ensure stylistic consistency. You can check all your drafts and texts in minutes with an AI proofreader .

Editing for grammar and clarity

When editing, you want to ensure your text is clear, concise, and grammatically correct. You’re looking out for:

• Grammatical errors.
• Ambiguous phrasings.
• Redundancy and repetition .

In your initial draft, it’s common to end up with a lot of sentences that are poorly formulated. Look critically at where your meaning could be conveyed in a more effective way or in fewer words, and watch out for common sentence structure mistakes like run-on sentences and sentence fragments:

• Austen’s style is frequently humorous, her characters are often described as “witty.” Although this is less true of Mansfield Park .
• Austen’s style is frequently humorous. Her characters are often described as “witty,” although this is less true of Mansfield Park .

To make your sentences run smoothly, you can always use a paraphrasing tool to rewrite them in a clearer way.

Proofreading for small mistakes and typos

When proofreading, first look out for typos in your text:

• Spelling errors.
• Missing words.
• Confused word choices .
• Punctuation errors .
• Missing or excess spaces.

Use a grammar checker , but be sure to do another manual check after. Read through your text line by line, watching out for problem areas highlighted by the software but also for any other issues it might have missed.

For example, in the following phrase we notice several errors:

• Mary Crawfords character is a complicate one and her relationships with Fanny and Edmund undergoes several transformations through out the novel.
• Mary Crawford’s character is a complicated one, and her relationships with both Fanny and Edmund undergo several transformations throughout the novel.

Proofreading for stylistic consistency

There are several issues in academic writing where you can choose between multiple different standards. For example:

• Whether you use the serial comma .
• Whether you use American or British spellings and punctuation (you can use a punctuation checker for this).
• Where you use numerals vs. words for numbers.
• How you capitalize your titles and headings.

Unless you’re given specific guidance on these issues, it’s your choice which standards you follow. The important thing is to consistently follow one standard for each issue. For example, don’t use a mixture of American and British spellings in your paper.

Additionally, you will probably be provided with specific guidelines for issues related to format (how your text is presented on the page) and citations (how you acknowledge your sources). Always follow these instructions carefully.

If you want to know more about AI for academic writing, AI tools, or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
• Sunk cost fallacy
• Deep learning
• Generative AI
• Machine learning
• Reinforcement learning
• Supervised vs. unsupervised learning

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• Grammar Checker
• Paraphrasing Tool
• Text Summarizer
• AI Detector
• Plagiarism Checker
• Citation Generator

Revising, proofreading, and editing are different stages of the writing process .

• Revising is making structural and logical changes to your text—reformulating arguments and reordering information.
• Editing refers to making more local changes to things like sentence structure and phrasing to make sure your meaning is conveyed clearly and concisely.
• Proofreading involves looking at the text closely, line by line, to spot any typos and issues with consistency and correct them.

Whether you’re publishing a blog, submitting a research paper , or even just writing an important email, there are a few techniques you can use to make sure it’s error-free:

• Take a break : Set your work aside for at least a few hours so that you can look at it with fresh eyes.
• Proofread a printout : Staring at a screen for too long can cause fatigue – sit down with a pen and paper to check the final version.
• Use digital shortcuts : Take note of any recurring mistakes (for example, misspelling a particular word, switching between US and UK English , or inconsistently capitalizing a term), and use Find and Replace to fix it throughout the document.

If you want to be confident that an important text is error-free, it might be worth choosing a professional proofreading service instead.

If you’ve gone over the word limit set for your assignment, shorten your sentences and cut repetition and redundancy during the editing process. If you use a lot of long quotes , consider shortening them to just the essentials.

If you need to remove a lot of words, you may have to cut certain passages. Remember that everything in the text should be there to support your argument; look for any information that’s not essential to your point and remove it.

To make this process easier and faster, you can use a paraphrasing tool . With this tool, you can rewrite your text to make it simpler and shorter. If that’s not enough, you can copy-paste your paraphrased text into the summarizer . This tool will distill your text to its core message.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

Caulfield, J. (2023, December 08). The Writing Process | 5 Steps with Examples & Tips. Scribbr. Retrieved August 7, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-writing/writing-process/

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Savvino-storozhevsky monastery and museum.

Zvenigorod's most famous sight is the Savvino-Storozhevsky Monastery, which was founded in 1398 by the monk Savva from the Troitse-Sergieva Lavra, at the invitation and with the support of Prince Yury Dmitrievich of Zvenigorod. Savva was later canonised as St Sabbas (Savva) of Storozhev. The monastery late flourished under the reign of Tsar Alexis, who chose the monastery as his family church and often went on pilgrimage there and made lots of donations to it. Most of the monastery’s buildings date from this time. The monastery is heavily fortified with thick walls and six towers, the most impressive of which is the Krasny Tower which also serves as the eastern entrance. The monastery was closed in 1918 and only reopened in 1995. In 1998 Patriarch Alexius II took part in a service to return the relics of St Sabbas to the monastery. Today the monastery has the status of a stauropegic monastery, which is second in status to a lavra. In addition to being a working monastery, it also holds the Zvenigorod Historical, Architectural and Art Museum.

Belfry and Neighbouring Churches

Located near the main entrance is the monastery's belfry which is perhaps the calling card of the monastery due to its uniqueness. It was built in the 1650s and the St Sergius of Radonezh’s Church was opened on the middle tier in the mid-17th century, although it was originally dedicated to the Trinity. The belfry's 35-tonne Great Bladgovestny Bell fell in 1941 and was only restored and returned in 2003. Attached to the belfry is a large refectory and the Transfiguration Church, both of which were built on the orders of Tsar Alexis in the 1650s.  

To the left of the belfry is another, smaller, refectory which is attached to the Trinity Gate-Church, which was also constructed in the 1650s on the orders of Tsar Alexis who made it his own family church. The church is elaborately decorated with colourful trims and underneath the archway is a beautiful 19th century fresco.

Nativity of Virgin Mary Cathedral

The Nativity of Virgin Mary Cathedral is the oldest building in the monastery and among the oldest buildings in the Moscow Region. It was built between 1404 and 1405 during the lifetime of St Sabbas and using the funds of Prince Yury of Zvenigorod. The white-stone cathedral is a standard four-pillar design with a single golden dome. After the death of St Sabbas he was interred in the cathedral and a new altar dedicated to him was added.

Under the reign of Tsar Alexis the cathedral was decorated with frescoes by Stepan Ryazanets, some of which remain today. Tsar Alexis also presented the cathedral with a five-tier iconostasis, the top row of icons have been preserved.

Tsaritsa's Chambers

The Nativity of Virgin Mary Cathedral is located between the Tsaritsa's Chambers of the left and the Palace of Tsar Alexis on the right. The Tsaritsa's Chambers were built in the mid-17th century for the wife of Tsar Alexey - Tsaritsa Maria Ilinichna Miloskavskaya. The design of the building is influenced by the ancient Russian architectural style. Is prettier than the Tsar's chambers opposite, being red in colour with elaborately decorated window frames and entrance.

At present the Tsaritsa's Chambers houses the Zvenigorod Historical, Architectural and Art Museum. Among its displays is an accurate recreation of the interior of a noble lady's chambers including furniture, decorations and a decorated tiled oven, and an exhibition on the history of Zvenigorod and the monastery.

Palace of Tsar Alexis

The Palace of Tsar Alexis was built in the 1650s and is now one of the best surviving examples of non-religious architecture of that era. It was built especially for Tsar Alexis who often visited the monastery on religious pilgrimages. Its most striking feature is its pretty row of nine chimney spouts which resemble towers.

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