Writerly Life

Editing and revising are not the same activity, nore do we do them at the same time. As you’ve seen, revision is big work. It often entails making our texts messier, in a sense. On the contrary, editing is about cleaning things up, putting on the finishing touches to make work ready for readers. This might include, then, proofreading to be sure that our punctuation, spelling, verb tenses or other grammatical conventions help readers understand what we want them to know. Note this doesn’t necessarily mean the work is “perfect.” In fact, it is important for the teacher to keep in mind that he or she should only hold students accountable for what has been taught. It would be unfair and unrealistic for the teacher to expect students to have correct noun/verb agreement in their writing, for example, if teachers haven’t talked to the students about this previously.