Revise and edit your writing to make a good impression.
It goes without saying that you should revise and edit your work. Have you ever sent in a paper or a manuscript to a publisher without revision? A clumsily written paper with grammatical mistakes may lead to a rejection. If you run a blog, typos will do nothing to increase the traffic in your website. Hence, make sure to revise and edit your writing.
What is revision?
When you revise a piece of writing, you are looking at the text for possible mistakes. A revision should be followed by a re-drafting of the text. You need to see if your argument follows a logical sequence, if all your ideas are in place, and if you need to include or exclude any points. Think of revision as structural editing. You must ensure that your text follows a proper structure before you start looking for spelling or grammatical mistakes.
What is editing?
Once you are satisfied with the revision, start the editing process. Editing is all about paying attention to detail. You need to scan your text for silly typos, grammatical and spelling errors, and syntactical mistakes. You must also ensure that the cited references are correct. Software for checking grammar and spelling can come in handy, but you cannot trust them blindly.
Errors that you may find when you revise and edit your work:
- One common error relates to the apostrophe.
Incorrect: I always spend summer holidays at my grandmothers house.
Correct: I always spend summer holidays at my grandmother’s house.
- Do you know that you can mix up two similar sounding words? For example: The word ‘affect’ means ‘to have an influence on’, while ‘effect’ means ‘to bring about something’.
Incorrect: The tragedy effected my family.
Correct: The tragedy affected my family.
- It is also common to make a mistake in the subject-verb agreement.
Incorrect: Each and every student were given chocolates.
Correct: Each and every student was given chocolates.
- You can sometimes misplace the modifiers and this may completely change the meaning of the sentence. Consider this rather funny example given on the University of Toronto website:
Incorrect: I could see my grandfather coming through the window.
Correct: Through the window, I could see my grandfather coming.
Making sure to revise and edit your work will increase the quality of your text. Remember, what you have written might be great, but the necessary tweaks will make it greater.
