Revising your paper is one of the most important activities in writing. Without it, you end up leaving much about the quality of your work to chance. And if you’ve written enough times, you’ll know the numbers don’t necessarily fall in your favor.
There are four general types of making revisions, each of which will require its own unique approach:
- Large-scale. This involves taking the paper as a whole and finding areas where your thought, reasoning and discussion falters. Think “big picture” issues, such as: Does your main thesis need to be fleshed out more with additional evidence? Would rewriting the paper’s structure allow it to make a more complete argument?
- Small-scale. This happens when you find individual parts of the paper, such as one paragraph, being ineffective. Maybe the conclusion needs to be revised to deliver a stronger impact. Perhaps, one of your evidence isn’t fully explained. The revision stays isolated in one place, though, and doesn’t affect the rest of the paper.
- Editing. This involves finding minor problems in the writing, specifically ones that can be fixed by simple means, such as substituting a word, rewriting a phrase or rearranging paragraph order.
- Proofreading. This refers to looking for mistakes of a mechanical nature, such as typos, punctuation errors and grammar problems.
Both large-scale and small-scale revisions will likely be beyond the scope of most writing programs to fix, especially since they’re primarily concerned with content. Editing and proofreading, however, can be aided by the same tool in numerous ways, so make sure you employ it.
