Writing Resources

This video describes the 3 steps of the Self-Editing process and the skills you'll learn and apply in each of the steps.

This document has a three-step Self-Editing Strategies Checklist and an FNU APA Chekclist. These can help you review your drafts for organization, flow, and language mechanics, and to check your work for correct APA style elements.

Presenter: Amanda Benson
This is an excellent overview of the necessity and value of revision. More broadly, it describes the *process of formal writing*. The presenter points out that creative writers revise multiple times and spend a lot of time crafting their stories. That sort of time may not be necessary for academic writing, it is nevertheless important to revise papers and assignment drafts; a typical scholarly paper often has above-average readers as its audience. Revision is not punishment; it’s a crucial part of writing that shouldn’t be dreaded. This video covers every stage of the writing process with clear instructions on what must be done to write clearly and accomplish the author’s purpose.

This site--on the right navigation panel--has handouts to assist you with revising and self-editing your own work, and beneath the handouts, video playlists (by topic) for REVISION, EDITING, AND PROOFREADING--THE THREE STAGES OF SELF EDITING.

This interactive model displays "elements of thought" in a wheel--hover over any element and a circle will tell more about how to clarify your thinking--how you construct and organize your ideas. The rectangle above the wheel helps you think about and improve the quality of your thinking. The wheel demonstrates how elements of your thinking integrate with other parts of thought.

From Purdue OWL: This site describes the issues that an author should address in revising written work, focusing first on big picture elements (ideas and how they're presented) followed by lower level copy-editing/proofing elements such as language mechanics and syntax. This is an excellent guide for self-editing and revision processes.

This site beautifully explains what rhetoric and rhetorical situations are. Seen excerpt from site in note below.

Excellent tips for editing to improve text at sentence level. Check for clarity and cohesion (avoid wordiness and redundancy) and improve sentence structure.

This Purdue OWL resource give basic instruction and advice regarding creation of understandable and coherent paragraphs.

Many first-time clients of a professional editing company or freelance editor are unsure about the difference between editing and proofreading, and which service they should choose. Editing and proofreading services produce different outcomes for writers, and therefore potential consumers must be aware of what they do.
"Editing can genuinely improve the quality of your writing, whereas proofreading perfects already good writing, and ensures that it is error-free" --experteditor.com.au--

Excellent brief article from Elsevier Author Services: The main purpose of proofreading is to improve the quality of the paper, ensuring there are no lingering mistakes, and correcting generalized discourse errors or writing inconsistencies. Essentially, you want to make sure you have a well-defined communication goal. Analyzing whether the content is properly conveyed, and the sentences are syntactically and grammatically well-written, are just two of the basic tasks to achieve publication-ready work. Specifically, a perfect manuscript, ready to be published in the most recognized scientific journals.

This handout shows how to proofread to locate and correct errors at sentence level: grammar, spelling, and punctuation. At this level, you also copy-edit for style, but using your discipline's style guidelines.

Scroll down to the video. This Writing Commons site has a superb, brief video to describe proofreading. The site has a list of tips on methods for proofreading at document and sentence levels: what to look for; slowing down; reading aloud and backwards, and have someone else read aloud to you. Photinos, C. (n.d.). Proofeading. Writing Commons. https://writingcommons.org/article/proofreading/

A concise video that offers tips on how to proofread text for common sentence level errors. From the UNC-Writing Center.

Demonstratcion of the Track Changes process of "marking up" text and use of "comments" in *MS Word Track Changes* to show comments and revisions are introduced into text to improve writing. From English Language Centre

This Walden University Writing Center site offers "Tips for Proofreading." This instructional content was created by the Walden University Writing Center and is reused under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.