What Is the Difference Between Revising and Editing?
Revising and editing are separate steps in refining your content. Revision involves substance, while editing involves language, grammar, and mechanics. Both are key to creating strong, polished content.
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Every writer knows that the first draft is rarely the finished product — revising and editing rounds occur between the rough draft and publication.
Revision and editing both describe work done to improve and refine a piece of writing, but they are two separate parts of the overall process.
Learn about the differences between revising and editing to get the most out of the process. Then, streamline your editing process with the Originality.ai Grammar Checker.
Key Takeaways (TL;DR)
- Revising centers on the substance, clarity and organization of the overall content.
- While editing gets more granular, digging into sentence-level structure, grammar, and mechanics.
Revising vs. Editing
Revising and editing address different aspects of written content. Each is a separate step in the writing process, with its focus and goals for improvement or clarification.
Revising
Revision occurs before editing begins. The writer typically does it before the content is sent to an editor. When a first draft is complete, the writer begins revising by considering the overall strengths and weaknesses of the content itself, such as:
- Clarity: Are the ideas clear and well communicated?
- Argument: Is the argument presented and supported well?
- Focus: Does the piece veer off-track?
- Organization: Does anything need to be moved around, deleted or added?
- Comprehensiveness: Is the information enough? Too much?
- Voice and tone: Are they on target for the topic, audience, and brand?
Revision allows the writer to step back and observe the writing from a different perspective. It’s the time to ensure the message is conveyed as intended and consider how a reader will experience it.
While revision may sound a lot like structural editing, this step comes even before those big-picture edits. It's the strengthening of the writing and messaging before editing begins.
Editing
After revision, editing begins. Depending on the type and length of writing, the editing process can involve up to four different stages or types of editing:
- Content editing: Big-picture, substance, theme
- Line editing: Stylistic refinement, prose tightening, word choice, readability
- Copy editing: Grammar, punctuation, spelling, formatting
- Proofreading: Final polish, typos, precision check
The editing process moves from the big picture to the tiny details, focusing on different aspects of writing at each step. Whether working with an editor or self-editing, it is best to break it into stages.
Why Are There So Many Types of Editing?
During editing, there are many things to look for structurally, at the sentence level, and in grammar mechanics.
Breaking up the process into stages helps to make it more manageable and allows you to narrow the focus on just a few details at a time.
Each round of edits is completed before the next one begins. For instance, the big-picture developmental and structural edits should be completed, and a new version of the content should be drafted before line edits begin.
The same should happen again before moving on to the copy editing and proofreading stages.
With each step, the copy gets more refined and polished until it is ready to be finalized for publication.
Final Thoughts: How to Revise and Edit Your Content
If you are the writer and editor of a piece of content, you need to go through each of these steps independently. However, when you spend a lot of time with your own words, seeing the writing from a reader’s perspective can be challenging. But it can be done, and there are ways to make it easier.
Create some distance between the writing and revising phases. If your timeline allows, let the writing sit a bit and work on something else, go on a walk, read a book — in short, take a break, so you can see them with fresh eyes when you return.
When you return to revise, have a checklist ready of what you are looking for. Read the work aloud to listen for any gaps in the overall structure, argument, organization, and completeness of your writing. Make your revisions, then take another break before moving on to editing. Grab your editing checklist. Allow for breaks before each phase.
Giving yourself time to gain a fresh perspective is an excellent way to refresh your eye for detail at each step. In the end, you’ll have a polished piece that is revised, edited, and ready for publication.
Then, to complete your editing checks, review your copy with the Originality.ai Grammar Checker to capture any spelling, grammar, or punctuation mistakes.
Discover more editing and grammar best practices in our top guides:
Melissa Fanella
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Frequently Asked Questions
Tools for conducting a plagiarism check between two documents online are important as it helps to ensure the originality and authenticity of written work. Plagiarism undermines the value of professional and educational institutions, as well as the integrity of the authors who write articles. By checking for plagiarism, you can ensure the work that you produce is original or properly attributed to the original author. This helps prevent the distribution of copied and misrepresented information.
Text comparison is the process of taking two or more pieces of text and comparing them to see if there are any similarities, differences and/or plagiarism. The objective of a text comparison is to see if one of the texts has been copied or paraphrased from another text. This text compare tool for plagiarism check between two documents has been built to help you streamline that process by finding the discrepancies with ease.
Text comparison tools work by analyzing and comparing the contents of two or more text documents to find similarities and differences between them. This is typically done by breaking the texts down into smaller units such as sentences or phrases, and then calculating a similarity score based on the number of identical or nearly identical units. The comparison may be based on the exact wording of the text, or it may take into account synonyms and other variations in language. The results of the comparison are usually presented in the form of a report or visual representation, highlighting the similarities and differences between the texts.
String comparison is a fundamental operation in text comparison tools that involves comparing two sequences of characters to determine if they are identical or not. This comparison can be done at the character level or at a higher level, such as the word or sentence level.
The most basic form of string comparison is the equality test, where the two strings are compared character by character and a Boolean result indicating whether they are equal or not is returned. More sophisticated string comparison algorithms use heuristics and statistical models to determine the similarity between two strings, even if they are not exactly the same. These algorithms often use techniques such as edit distance, which measures the minimum number of operations (such as insertions, deletions, and substitutions) required to transform one string into another.
Another common technique for string comparison is n-gram analysis, where the strings are divided into overlapping sequences of characters (n-grams) and the frequency of each n-gram is compared between the two strings. This allows for a more nuanced comparison that takes into account partial similarities, rather than just exact matches.
String comparison is a crucial component of text comparison tools, as it forms the basis for determining the similarities and differences between texts. The results of the string comparison can then be used to generate a report or visual representation of the similarities and differences between the texts.
Syntax highlighting is a feature of text editors and integrated development environments (IDEs) that helps to visually distinguish different elements of a code or markup language. It does this by coloring different elements of the code, such as keywords, variables, functions, and operators, based on a predefined set of rules.
The purpose of syntax highlighting is to make the code easier to read and understand, by drawing attention to the different elements and their structure. For example, keywords may be colored in a different hue to emphasize their importance, while comments or strings may be colored differently to distinguish them from the code itself. This helps to make the code more readable, reducing the cognitive load of the reader and making it easier to identify potential syntax errors.
With our tool it’s easy, just enter or upload some text, click on the button “Compare text” and the tool will automatically display the diff between the two texts.
Using text comparison tools is much easier, more efficient, and more reliable than proofreading a piece of text by hand. Eliminate the risk of human error by using a tool to detect and display the text difference within seconds.
We have support for the file extensions .pdf, .docx, .odt, .doc and .txt. You can also enter your text or copy and paste text to compare.
There is never any data saved by the tool, when you hit “Upload” we are just scanning the text and pasting it into our text area so with our text compare tool, no data ever enters our servers.
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