Overview

Since revision and editing often occur at the same point in the writing process, the two terms are frequently used interchangeably. However, revision and editing are different in scale and purpose from one another. It is important to understand these differences, since they will help you develop a more efficient process for refining your drafts.

Revision refers to higher-order concerns (such as purpose, content, and structure) when making changes. For example, it is common for writers working on a first draft to arrive at their point most clearly at a paragraph’s end, since the act of writing helps us to organize our thoughts. However, it is much more helpful for the reader to see the point clearly at the very beginning, so the writer might revise this paragraph by putting the last sentence first and adjusting as needed. The writer might also find that they need to spend more time explaining a particular point, or that a paragraph should be taken out because it is either off-topic or too similar in content to another.

Editing, by contrast, refers to lower-order concerns (such as grammar, word choice, and syntax) when making changes. The focus of editing is not to substantially alter a document but rather to make sure its presentation is more polished. Too many grammatical or syntactical errors, such as misspellings or sentence fragments, can make it harder for the reader to absorb content. They can even undermine the reader’s assessment of the writer’s expertise.

In addition to revision-based higher-order concerns and editing-based lower-order concerns, there are mid-level concerns that exist between pure revision and pure editing. Isolating these concepts from the previous two categories emphasizes how choices at the sentence level accumulate to impact a document’s overall content and structure, such as paragraph length and tone.

As you may have guessed, higher-order revision concerns usually entail much more work than the others and should come first. This is because revision is essential to ensuring that a draft is composed and structured effectively, so that it fulfills its intended purpose and caters to audiences’ expectations. There is also little point in checking for comma placement in a paragraph that might be removed from or rearranged in the final draft.