Revising and Editing
David Sting
Revising and editing are critical to the success of your documents. Although these processes often overlap and definitions vary slightly from expert to expert and company to company, their fundamental purposes remain the same: to increase the accessibility, comprehensibility, and usability of documents, presentations, and visuals.
Revising generally refers to the process of changing overall (or global) elements of documents.
Editing generally refers to (1) changing specific (or local) elements of documents and (2) managing administrative details necessary for document publication.
Types of Revising and Editing
- Revising focuses on global aspects of the document such as content, organization, argument, and design.
- Substantive editing also focuses on global aspects of the document.
- Design review focuses on the overall design of the document.
- Copy editing focuses on global aspects such as logic and format and local aspects such as language conventions and consistency.
- Proofreading in electronic publishing usually involves eliminating typographical errors in the electronic version without comparison to the original.
- Administrative editing focuses on the aspects of compliance with the organization's policies and management of a range of tasks related to electronic or print publication.
Levels of Editing
- Substantive edit-reviews the document globally for accuracy, logic, completeness, coherence, consistency, organization, and tone.
- Format edit- establishes consistency in "macro" physical elements such as headings, fonts, page design, use of visuals.
- Integrity edit- matches text references to corresponding figures, tables, references, footnotes, and appendixes.
- Mechanical style- establishes consistency in "micro" physical elements.
- Screening edit-corrects language and numerical errors.
- Language edit- changes grammar, punctuation, usage, and sentence structure to meet conventions, such as symbols, citations, and numerical copy.
- Policy edit- ensures that institutional policies are enforced.
- Clarification edit- provides clear instruction to the compositor and graphic artist.
- Coordination edit- deals with the administrative aspects in publishing technical documents.
Benefits and Limitations of using software to proofread texts.
Software CAN identify: misspelled words, passive voice, complex sentences, wrong part of speech, redundancy, potentially difficult wording(based on word and sentence lengths only), slang/colloquialisms, potentially sexist language, and negative wording.
Software CANNOT identify: correctly spelled words used incorrectly, inconsistent writing styles, confusing sentence structures, what the audience needs to know, every grammar/mechanical problem, poorly organized documents, missing or faulty information, potentially offensive ideas, and how a document will be used.
To fully proofread a documents you need to check for accuracy and consistency in five broad areas:
- Mechanical conventions(punctuation, capitalization, spelling)
- Grammatical conventions (grammar, usage)
- Design conventions (typography, visual displays, headings)
- Disciplinary conventions (abbreviations, citations)
- Typographical conventions (symbols, numbers)
15 comments:
Revising and editing are a major importance when dealing with any typical document. I think that we have all become very dependant on spell check as well. We hit the spell check button and expect everything to be okay but spell check doesn't change the gramar that you have used. I actually thinkg that I am a worse speller now than I was a couple years ago becuase spell check is bsically my best friend. So therefore I think that this chapter could be very beneficial becuase it teaches you to go through and read each sentence to see if it actually makes sense. Alot of times when we type we think we type in words but they are not actually being typed. So we must never just rely on spell check, we have to dig deeper in order to have better documentation.
There are many people that rely on many word processing programs to catch many or all of their mistakes. While many may be caught, there are still quite a few that get past and can cause a good paper to be difficult to read and confusing. If more people would read over the information contained in this chapter, there would be many less of these common mistakes.
Technical documents should be as accurate as possible in order for the audience to interpret and understand the information. Sometimes due to mistakes like spelling, grammar and word choice, the information could be mis-interpreted and therefore fails to accurately convey the desired information. For example mistakes in instruction manuals could result in the audience being unable to perform the specified task. Therefore this chapter presents a very important topic that we have to pay close attention to before releasing the documents to the audience. It would be advisable to even have somebody else goes through the document to verify its accuracy and correctness.
no matter what you are doing in your life it is important to check and revise your work. whether it is reviseing a document of some sort or you just got done doing a construction job of some sort. you always want to look over your work when you are done just to make sure you didnt over look something or mess something up. reviseing is really important to alot of proffessionals because if your work is sloppy then that will say something about your work ethics.
Revising and editing is obviously critical to the success of a presentation or documents. It helps in increasing the accessibility, comprehensibility, and usability of documents, presentation and visuals. One of the examples for it can be a class project like a wind farm project which should be revised and edited before it is presented. The levels of editing can be anywhere between ‘micro’ to ‘macro’. It can be revising on punctuations, grammar, or check whether it provides a clear information to the audience or not.
Revising and editing is major portion to implement on document.It has use most when we write on words. When we do some writing we keep on track to check spelling and grammar.This chapter make more attention to revising and editing the report more as we can and make it perfect that audience will understand.This is basic way which we do in our daily writing.
Whenever I type a document I just go with my thoughts and don't stop too often to check my work. As soon as I am finished I will go back and read through it. There has yet to be a time when I do not find any mistakes! It is very important to go back and check your work and do some editing before making a final copy. Handing in a draft that has not been looked through and edited will look very bad and unprofessional.
Revising and editing are extremly important because if you are presenting a document, presentation, or really anything you want it to look professional. You want people to know you spent time on it and care about what you are doing instead of just rushing through it. One thing that I do is after I have proofread and edited is to have somone else look at it also because they always seem to find things that you didn't notice.
When I am typing a paper, my main problem is the rising and editing part of it. When I type it and read it I don’t notice all of the mistakes that I really make and then they don’t get caught until I turn it in and get a bad grade on it. It is not that I do not reread what I type it just I don’t really notice everything that I make mistakes on. Over all this was a very good summery and explanation of what revising and editing is and they different forms of the both of them.
Revising and editing are a hugh factor of importance when typeing or dealing with any kind of document. The use of spell check and editing has become very useful for us and we are loseing focus on how to truly revise a paper. I think that people have lost some knowledge on how to spell particular words because spell check does it for you. This chapter is useful because it goes through and teaches you to go through and read sentences to see if their actually understandable. This chapter was well written and understood well.
This is one thing that I think I am fairly good at. My friends sometimes get annoyed at how often I catch spelling mistakes and grammar errors. But it is a very good skill to have at your disposale. Your image in life will have a lot to do with how effective you are at communicating, and that depends a lot on how you present yourself. I'm going no where with this so I'm done commenting!
II think revising and editing are crucial to prepare better documents, presentation and visuals. Unknowingly we all have certain simple mistakes in our documents which can be corrected while revising. Proofreading can correct a lot of mistakes, in other words revising and editing improves the quality of document and makes it more comprehensible. The chapter was well summarized and i think was revised and edited before posting.
This is a very important chapter, Dan and David do a good job of keeping it short and not dragging it out. Constant editing and revising are paramount. Proof reading by someone else is always good too.
This group did a very good job of organizing their information and it makes it very easy to read and find information that you maybe looking for. Editing any type of information or paper for that matter becomes a long and strenuous process. This summary gives you a guideline to follow to help in your transition. The editing phase of any project is usually more difficult than finding all the information needed to write your report or put that technical document together. Reading over and over, and having others read your work over and over with scrutinizes from each reader. Some of the time the criticism is not always easy to take, all people have opinion and some are not always nice.
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