Editing your writing

This resource will help you:

• Identify why editing is an important part of the academic writing process.
• Understand and apply the key principles of editing to your writing.
• Develop simple strategies to rate and analyse a text for structure, content, style, and errors.
• Apply the principles of editing of your work to avoid critical mistakes.

Editing is about crafting your words to clearly and effectively communicate your thinking. It is a systematic process in which you:

1. Ask a series of questions about your writing.
2. Find ways to improve your writing based on these questions.
3. Apply your improvements and rewrite as required.

Editing is an important part of the academic writing process and a great step to incorporate into how you complete assessments. If you have ever felt rushed handing in an assessment, noticed some small mistakes after you have submitted, lacked confidence with the quality of your work, or received a grade you were not happy with - learning to edit can help you!

If you try to fix mistakes as you write, you will focus only on your mistakes. This is a great way to develop writer's block. So, rather than worrying too much about your writing at the beginning, remember:

Getting your ideas and thinking on paper is more important than writing amazing sentences. 

To help you with the editing process in the long run, aim to:

• Start your assessments early to make sure you have time for editing.
• Remember that your first draft is never your last draft.
• Treat writing as a continuous process, not a one-off event: you need to write, edit, then rewrite.
• Have some time away from your writing before you edit it.
• Imagine that you are the reader, not the writer, when you are editing.

Once you have a first draft - no matter how rough or messy or bad you think it is - you can begin the editing process.  Remember that you will likely have a few drafts and will therefore repeat the editing process several times. When editing, keep in mind that it is most important for your assessment to clearly and fully answer the question, so focus on making edits for structure and content first (this is the 'big picture'). Only once these are improved should you focus on making your writing easy to read and error-free by editing for style and errors (this is the 'little picture'). You do not want to spend all your time editing for errors by rewording sentences, only to find out later that you need to change the entire structure and rewrite those sentences all over again! To help guide you through this process, consider the questions below.

The key questions to ask yourself when editing

1. Have I clearly answered the question? This is editing for structure.
2. Have I fully answered the question? This is editing for content.
3. Is my writing clear & simple to read? This is editing for style.
4. Is my writing accurate & error-free? This is editing for errors.

Each of these four focus areas are explored in more detail below. As you move through each, try to identify what you have done well and what you could do better. Remember that editing is how you learn to write better, so it is okay if there are lots of ways you can improve!

Editing for structure does not have to be super technical or complicated. Read through your writing and ask yourself the following four questions. How would you rate each one out of five?

1. Is the information in the text clearly organised into groups?
2. Is the grouping of information logical, for example, chronological, problem-solution, or cause-effect?
3. Does the text include phrases that signpost the structure and organisation of the text to the reader?
4. Overall, does the organisation and structure of the text help answer the assessment question?

This very quickly shows you what you think (and/or how you feel) about the structure of the text. When you have judged how good or bad the text is, then you can decide how much editing at this level you need to do. This is when you would dive more deeply into the text to better understand how you could improve it.

To do this, simply make an outline of the text. This outline can be in any form you like, such as a numbered list summarising each topic sentence of each paragraph, dot-points highlighting your headings and subheadings, or a flow chart connecting related groups of information. Regardless, the outline will be easy to construct if your writing is well structured. If it is not well structured, the outline will be confusing for you to make, and you will likely need to reread your text several times.

Once you have completed your editing for structure, check the content of your writing by asking yourself the following four questions. How would you rate each one out of five? 

1. Does the text answer the question?
2. Is the answer fully explained?
3. Is all the information in the text relevant to the answer?
4. Overall, how well does the text answer the question?

Once again, this quickly gives you a good idea about what you think (and/or how you feel) about the content of your writing. Just like editing for structure, we can follow a simple process of asking specific questions and judging the text from the perspective of the marker.

Here, we can consider the "proper way" to be the writing style relevant to your discipline and/or specified by your task instructions or marking guide. Once you have your draft and have already edited it for structure and content, you can edit it for academic style. The simplest way to edit for academic style is to firstly ask the question: Can my writing be understood on the first reading? You can answer this question by noticing two things as you read:

1. How many times do you have to stop and reread the text?
2. Why do you have to stop and reread the text? What issues are causing this?

Editing your text for errors involves proofreading : the process of finding and fixing errors in spelling, punctuation, and grammar. It is a crucial part of the editing process that promotes clarity, accuracy, and cohesion in your written expression. Ideally, proofreading should be checked after you have edited for structure, content, and style - you will likely need to do a few cycles of writing and rewriting during these first three stages of editing, and we inevitably make mistakes as we write. So, by leaving the proofreading until the end, you will likely save yourself from rereading your document over and over again, whilst simultaneously helping to ensure you don't miss any errors!

Proofreading requires having an eye for detail, which is not always easy. To help, you may like to consider using some of the proofreading strategies listed in Table 1 below (Petelin & Durham, 2003).

There are many approaches you can take and remember you do not have to use them all! Experiment with a few different strategies and find which ones work best for you. For example, you may find that you prefer proofreading on an electronic copy rather than paper, or that you would rather use sticky-notes on a printed copy rather than a pen. As you edit, you may find it easier to print your assignment and hand write suggested changes in the margin.  Alternatively, you may like to work electronically by adding comments or tracked changes directly into your text.

There is no right or wrong approach to using these strategies. However you choose to edit, this is an important step in your academic writing that helps you to better communicate your argument to your reader. 

It is important to remember that each type of assessment you complete will have a different structure, as well as requiring different content. Sometimes, this structure may differ between courses, despite being of the same type or within the same discipline. Therefore, it is important to always make sure you understand the expected structure for the type of assessment you are writing and adhere to all task-specific instructions for your course.

Below is a list of resources for the main types of assessments here at UniSC: