In Check Your Writing you read your work over before you shared it. Longer writing needs more than one check at the end. Most writers move through five stages, and they often go back to an earlier one when they learn something new.
| Stage | What you do | The question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Prewriting | Choose and narrow a topic, gather ideas, plan | What will I say? |
| Drafting | Write it all the way through, without stopping to polish | Can I get it all down? |
| Revising | Add, cut, move and replace ideas, sentences and paragraphs | Does it say what I mean, in the best order? |
| Editing | Fix grammar, punctuation, spelling and format | Is every sentence correct? |
| Publishing | Share the clean copy with its readers | Is it ready for them? |
Key idea
Writers prewrite, draft, revise, edit and publish. Revising changes what the writing says and how it is organized; editing fixes the sentences. The stages loop: a writer who finds a gap while revising goes back to gather more ideas.
Why it works
Doing everything at once is slow and frustrating. If you fix commas while you are still deciding what to say, you may polish a sentence you later cut. Separate stages let you think about one kind of problem at a time: ideas first, then order, then sentences.
Worked example: Which stage is it?
Lena moves her best reason from the middle of her essay to the end, so it is the last thing her reader remembers. Which stage is she in?
- She is not fixing a comma or a spelling, so this is not editing.
- She is changing the order of her ideas.
- Changing ideas and order is revising.
Answer: Revising.
Worked example: Revising or editing?
Omar changes “there dog” to “their dog.” Which stage is that?
- He changed one word to the correct spelling.
- The idea and the order are the same as before.
- Fixing a word or a mark in a sentence is editing.
Answer: Editing.
Common mistake
Thinking revising means fixing spelling. A paper with every comma right can still be missing its best example or have its paragraphs in a confusing order. Check: after you revise, could a reader tell that the ideas changed? If only the commas changed, you edited.
Writing on a computer blurs the stages, since you can fix things as you go. That is fine, as long as you still make a separate pass for ideas and a separate pass for errors. The Mother Tongue books on this site teach the same habit: plan, write, then read it over with fresh eyes.