The Importance Of Revision And Editing
Writing is a long and arduous process that most students fear and hate throughout their whole academic careers. Many put off starting the writing process for as long as they can almost as if it may go away if they ignore it long enough, but in the end they have to face it. A writer must put in hours, days, and weeks of research and planning go into gathering all the information and planning out a well thought argument finally lead up to the completion of a draft. At this point it seems like the writing process might finally be coming to an end, but the reality is that the possibly most painful part of the writing process is still yet to be done, editing and revising.
I am sure plenty of people blow off editing or cheapen it to simply spell checking and grammar checking their initial draft. Personally, I know in my days at school I would constantly use my first draft as the final draft with the addition of a few grammatical revisions or two. Proper revision however, is an incredibly long and time consuming process, but it is necessary to get the best out of the piece being written. If it was not so important editors would not be able to make a living. A good comparison is to compare it to coding on a computer. It is not enough to simply write out a program, but it must be properly debugged for it to efficiently or at all for that matter.
Although it is good to give your own written work a thorough look through, I feel that the best way is to get a new set of eyes to look through your written piece. Sometimes a piece of writing will completely make sense to writer and nonsense to outsiders. As a result a writer editing through his own work will often overlook a lot of areas that may seem clear to him but would bring about questions or confusion with many readers. If possible get many people to critically read through your written work and at various stages of your writing process. Do it until you, and your “editors”, are completely happy with your work.
Now, for those that are editing the paper, it is important that you read with a critical eye. It is all too easy to read through a piece and simply blow through errors that we think are acceptable or we attribute to the writer’s style. Do this and I guarantee that the writer will be upset at the lack of criticism his work receives. An editor really needs to try and work his opinion in on anything and everything in the paper that seems even the slightest bit off, even if it is an area that is already good, but could be better.
Any constructive criticism that can be offered in relation to the writer’s work really benefits the writer because it offers insight into what thoughts and concerns future readers may have regarding the written piece. Having this insight gives the writer a chance to clear up any unintended confusion and also a chance to add in something to address questions or arguments that may commonly pop up from the written work. We may not like it, but editing is really what makes our writing professional, presentable, or in some cases readable. So get editing.
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