In my personal opinion, revising and editing are the most important parts of the writing process no matter which discipline you’re writing for. I don’t know that the book shares my opinion.
Certainly it presents the revision process as a time when you should question and reaffirm absolutely every element of your work, to be very thorough and to carefully examine every choice you’ve made so far. I agree with this.
Some useful tips for editing:
- double-check quotations, facts and figures, and spelling for accuracy.
- focus on ensuring that every statement you’ve made is stated as plainly and as efficiently as possible.
- edit for consistency -- consistency in your formatting, in your treatment of concepts and ideas, in your methods for writing out numbers, and perhaps obviously your citation methods for your sources.
Quality editing takes time and relentless thoroughness. The book recommends reading your entire paper backward sentence by sentence or even word by word. Other than that, don’t be afraid to mark up your document and make lots of changes, and don’t depend overmuch on automated editing tools. Microsoft spellcheck has more than its fair share of foibles.
Finally, the book would remind us emphatically that outside feedback is one of the most valuable resources we can find, for revising and editing. Well, in some situations it can be difficult to acquire outside feedback. Still, a fresh perspective can spot things the writer can’t -- like points that weren’t explained clearly enough, or simple errors the writer might have passed over simply because they’ve seen the paper so many times.
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