Revision is one of the most important steps in the writing process. Every writer does some sort of revision on their work before releasing it to their audience. However, revision goes much farther than simply hitting the spell check button. A good revision can make or break your work, which in the professional writing world, may cost you that big promotion you've been working so hard for your whole career. Therefore it pays to learn good revising habits and make it second nature to practice this on all of your work.

First, you want to start basic revision which handles checking your grammar, correcting your misspelled words, and making sure your facts are valid and up to date. Having typos or misused grammar can instantly dismantle any credibility you have gained from your reader. Also a more difficult task is making sure your facts are bona fide and are current. This is so difficult because what could be true today may not be true tomorrow. For example, if I write a paper today saying that Obama is our president it would be true, however ten years from now, this would be false.

As Barry Gilmore mentions in this video, revision goes much farther than that. A good revision improves the paper's readability. Readability is very important aspect to your work. It will make it easier for the audience to extract information from your work and assist in keeping the reader's attention. A few good ways to do this are as follows:

• Eliminate distracting visuals
• Make sure you do not repeat information unless its completely necessary.
• Try to combine smaller sentences into larger, more complex sentences, which is a more efficient way to provide information to your audience
• Try to condense run-on sentences that ramble on endlessly. This can confuse your reader and loose their attention
• If you are writing to one of your colleagues, try to use jargon to help condense these run-on sentences. Jargon is "specialized or techincal language used within a particular group, organization or field." For example, for students this could be "dropping a class."

As if all that is not enough, be careful not to change the context in what you are trying to say. Often, when changing sentences around and replacing words, you can completely shift the meaning of your paper. This can confuse the reader, causing decreased readability.

If you follow these tips carefully, you should see a drastic improvement in your writing ability.

Sean H.

Reference:

Technical Communication in the Twentieth Century