“What is the purpose of revising?” This question is often asked by students. We can tell you many reasons why you should revise your paper; however, all of them can be simmered down to one main reason. This reason is to make your work perfect. Many famous writers assert that they spend more time on revising than on writing the first draft. Why is it so? Let us unleash this secret by making an overview of the revision in writing.
What is revision in writing?
Revision in writing includes all the many aspects, from transformative changes in content and, of course, argumentation to minor adjustments in grammar and punctuation in the text. Revising the paper can initially seem intimidating and torment you with doubts about how to move from a sketch to the main document or when to start making edits to the text.
Establishing an editing process can help students write thoughtful and polished texts, ultimately developing their written communication skills. Then, think about a systematic approach to the review, including strategies to be implemented at each stage of the process.
Why is revision important in the writing process?
You can understand why revision is important if you consider all the necessary aspects of the process and draw specific conclusions from this. With the help of the revision, you can step back figuratively and take a different look at the work you created. Consequently, this will lead to finding ways to improve clarity, sentence structure, and of course, overall efficiency. Although it may seem that the original text is okay and can be sent to the professor as it is, the time you spend on checking will be reasonable.
The purpose of revision is to find out that you need to remove unnecessary sections, add new information, and reorganize your ideas. After you add changes to your text, you can improve your paper and make it as constructive as possible. Be active in this topic because repetition allows you to correct mistakes quickly and significantly improve your writing style. Refrain from looking at your experience because no matter how well and interestingly you write your papers, everything has room to grow and improve. By taking the time to use revision in writing, you can write an excellent report.
How to revise your writing without mistakes?
There are three main aspects of your academic paper you need to keep in mind while editing and revising it – content and structure, facts, and grammar. Let’s have a closer look at each of them with examples and explanations.
Part One: Content and Structure
First of all, we want you to take a look at these two pictures of the same sample essay. What differences can you spot from first sight?
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Mistake #1: no paragraphs.
Paragraphs are there not because your professor thought at one point: “Well, let’s make essay writing even harder and force students to format their papers!” As you can see from the screenshot above, they make the text easier to comprehend and pleasant to look at. It’s structured and divided, and not just a lump of words piled together with no divisions and logical emphasis.
Mistake #2: too long paragraphs.
When you are “on the go,” and smart ideas just keep popping up to your head, you sometimes forget how to stop. Make sure that you are not creating too long sentences, like Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, who was famous for writing sentences that started on one page and ended on the other. Also watch out for too long paragraphs – a perfect one ranges from 60 to 100 words, which is between five and eight lines.
Mistake #3: new information at the conclusion part.
Another common mistake that is not featured on the screenshot is adding new information or arguments at the conclusion of your paper. Students either feel that they need more arguments to prove their thesis, or they don’t meet the volume requirements, or both, but a lot of them start writing a new essay when they are supposed to finish it.
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There’s an easy formula to write a killer conclusion – restate your thesis, say why it’s important and mention your major arguments (this means you need to have no more than three) in your conclusion, and that’s it. You’ll see – being brief and to the point will do wonders to your final grade. The revision writing process helps keep the text concise and not dilute it with additional words.
Part Two: Factual Information
Now that you know what is revision in writing concerning the structure of your paper, let’s move one to the facts and information. When you are writing an essay or a research paper, you are supposed to be as scientific as possible. But what does this mean, apart from adding a bibliography and oddly sounding language constructions? First of all, this means being accurate with the information and avoiding the following mistakes during the revision writing process:
Mistake #1: presenting opinions as facts.
The opinion that violent computer games contribute to increasing violent crime rates among young offenders, however popular, was not backed-up by substantial research data. It’s okay to adhere to a certain point of view in your everyday life, but when it comes to academic papers, you have to offer research data to prove your point of view. And don’t forget to list opposing views as counterarguments!
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Mistake #2: relying on everyday facts without checking them.
We bet you’ve heard that humans use only 10% of their brain capacity, and we could be superheroes if we increased that to 100%. Well, that is not true – we actually do use 100% of our brains, or else 90% of the volume is useless and it would have disappeared during the evolutionary process.
Check out the example below. Not only does it not have a reference to a credible scientific source to back-up the statement, but it’s also based on a completely false assumption.
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Mistake #3: mixing up facts and names.
Can you indicate what is wrong with this sentence from first glance, apart from a trivial introduction of the quote?
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Okay, as you’ve already guessed, the mistake has something to do with facts and dates, hence the name of the paragraph. This quote, which mainly became famous due to the Internet, was said by Evelyn Hall, an English writer and the creator of Voltaire’s biography. If you have doubts about something in your paper, it’s better to check twice.
Part Three: Grammar
Now you know what is revising in writing when it comes to content and information in your paper. Here is good news: the grammar part is the easiest. All you have to do is to be attentive enough to spot tiny typos and grammatical mistakes. Here are our top three mistakes with examples you need to keep your eye on while editing:
1) Run-on sentences.
A comma is missing before the coordinating conjunction. Here’s a quick editing tip: if the two clauses can be independent sentences on their own, you should insert a comma in-between.
2) Dangling modifiers.
The author is trying to say that the sales were declining, but due to a misplaced modifier it sounds like Bob is the one who was “declining.”
3) Incorrect personal pronouns.
The mistake here is that a brand or an entity should be referred to as “it,” not “they.”
Revision techniques writing will not only help you improve your work and stop getting negative grades. Sometimes even for a great idea in the text, you can get a low score because the work will be written with errors, and at the same time, it will spoil the overall impression of the text. Read a few tips for each revision stage of writing.
Stage 1: Writing with inspiration
In revision tips for writing, we want to point out that when you are writing a story, you feel inspired and carried by enthusiasm. You don’t care about spelling, accuracy of facts, diction and other details. The only thing that you are fretting about is your idea. You know that if you stop, you can lose the flow of your thoughts and ruin the entire story. Therefore, you try to write without breaks. Such an approach is often used for writing short stories, essays or novellas. With long works such as novels, you are not able to complete them in one sitting. However, it’s possible to write down the whole plot in one sitting.
Stage 2: Looking at your paper with a cool head
Revision tips for writing When the first draft is ready, you calm down and become able to think with a cool head. This stage is actually your first revision. If you think that revision is a process that you do only after writing, you are mistaken. The reality is that you revise your paper several times while writing and at the end you conduct the final revision. The purpose of revision at the second stage is to define the main flaws in your work.
First of all, you should pay attention to obvious lapses that negatively influence the sense of your paper. What are they? They are obvious inconsistencies, inaccuracies and redundancies. This advice is suitable for creative and scholarly writing. However, you should consider the following factors.
When you are completing an essay for academic purpose, you should make sure that you provide the reader with accurate and up-to-date information. If you are working on literary work, you can be inaccurate from time to time, but you can’t afford yourself such a luxury to be boring.
Stage 3: Revising your work after a break
After finishing the first revision, you need to take a break. How long it will be is up to you to decide. You will feel when you are ready to continue working on your paper. The purpose of revision at the third stage is to clean your paper from redundancies.
Revising tips to clean redundancies
1) Use your outline. If you have completed an outline before writing, you are a prudent student. An outline helps to keep your paper well-structured. Use your outline to define which paragraphs you should delete and which you need to enhance.
2) Keep your paper balanced. Let’s suppose that you need to complete a six hundred word essay. The optimal amount of points in your outline will be five, including the intro and conclusion. Another three paragraphs will concern the specific points in the topic. You should try to make each paragraph equal to other paragraphs. revision stage of writing. At the revision stage of writing, we want to assure you that the introduction and conclusion can be shorter than each paragraph of the body —however, they should be equal to each other.
Examples
One of our examples demonstrates unbalanced text, another one balanced text. Do you see the difference? The balanced essay is easier to perceive and to understand than the unbalanced text.
3) Be merciless. Don’t fight for every word. Believe us, not all of them are really necessary. You should definitely exclude sentences that present obvious ideas and words that don’t play an important role. Delete sentences and words that look redundant. Afterward, make sure that you haven’t ruined any claims.
Examples
Underlined and circled phrases can be rewritten. Try to amend them on your own. Afterward, look up for our suggestions:
Stage 4: Revising details
The purpose of revision at this staging point is to amend details. What kind of details do we mean?
- Names
- Dates
- Specific terms
- Words that are often confused
If you don’t check the details, you can be misunderstood or your paper will look weird. Look through our examples to understand where inadvertency can bring you.
Examples:
The sentences that you can see above are weird. We should change the words that are circled in red to make those sentences have sense. We should change the word “climatic” to the word “climactic.” Despite the fact that they look very similar, they have quite different meanings. “Climactic” is forming a climax and “climatic” relates to climate.
What concerns “draught,” we should change it to draft. Though these words are pronounced in a similar way, their spelling and meaning differs. “Draft” is a first version of writing work while “draught” is a current of air.
Stage 5: Editing
We hope we already answered your question, “What is the purpose of revising?” Now, we would like to tell you briefly about the last stage of writing, which is editing. At this step you need to check your paper for grammatical mistakes and check accuracy of details from the previous stage the last time. We won’t stop at this step because this article is about revision. However, you can look for information about editing in other articles on our blog.
How to simplify your paper review?
We have already clearly explained why editing what is written is very important and how exactly it is best done. It is not for nothing that magazines, publishing houses, and printers have different positions of editors who check each text for compliance with the expectations of readers and critics. Editing requires excellent knowledge of both harmonics and academic writing. Therefore, we are ready to share with you a few tips that will help you simplify your verification, even if you are not a student of the Faculty of Philology or not a writer. Read the following paragraphs to eliminate any errors in your text easily.
- Ask a friend to read your text.
Let another person look at your work so you can see an independent opinion and see exactly where you may have missed a mistake. It is an outside view that can reveal what you might have missed in the main text. But at the same time, you should only partially rely on another person’s opinion and do additional editing after checking.
- Use modern technology.
You can check the text for grammar, punctuation, spam, and more using special programs, websites, or browser extensions. In a matter of seconds, the well-known Grammarly will show you where you missed problems, a comma, or an extra word. But in this option, you must understand that artificial intelligence also tends to make mistakes, and the site may not see all the errors. Either way, you’ll get through editing faster with technology.
- Find inspiration for editing.
If you find it difficult to check your work with texts, you need the inspiration to motivate you and concentrate more on the task in front of you. You can take an example of a paper that you are impressed with in a good way and aim for a similar level of writing. It will also be helpful for you to surround yourself with an atmosphere of creativity with candles / soft lights/fragrances, etc.
Checklist to help you in revision writing
We have prepared a checklist to make it easier for you to check your spelling. By looking at these questions, it will be easier for you to understand whether you missed some important aspect of editing or not. Just a few sentences will point you in the right direction during revision in writing.
- Did you take a break between writing and editing?
- Did everything you wrote correspond to the assignment from the professor?
- Does the paper you wrote have a plan and a clear structure?
- Have you checked for spelling, punctuation, and syntax errors?
- Have you presented all the information as concisely and consistently as possible?
- Do you want to delete an extra sentence if it spoils the overall picture of the text?
- For accuracy, have you checked all names, dates, events, etc.?
- Did you check the text for uniqueness?
- Was the format you chose fully respected in your paper?
Reviewing papers with EssaySeek
After reading our post about how the revising stage of the writing process affects the final result, you need to consider how much it improves the final work. It is also obvious that editing will take a lot of time, and you must be prepared for this. Sometimes students have many tasks that need to be completed quickly and efficiently, and it is complicated to do everything.
The authors of our EssaySeek service will gladly help you find a balance in work, study, and everyday life by taking over the editing or writing of your papers. Our experts are readily available for any task despite the difficulty. The service is available 24/7, and the support team is reached at any time of the day. You can be sure of the quality of their writing and the timely delivery of your order. Our team guarantees uniqueness, security, anonymity, and quality to every student who comes to us. So feel free to go to the order form to get the best editing for your text!
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