Editing and Revising Review

What you need to know. ⚫ Revise for Big Changes: Improve your essay by adding details, rearranging ideas, and clarifying your argument. Focus on making your writing smooth and easy to follow.

⚫ Edit for Small Fixes: Check grammar, spelling, punctuation, and formatting to polish your essay and make it ready to submit.

⚫ Make Your Voice Shine: Use active voice, strong word choices, and parallel structure to make your writing clear, consistent, and impactful.

You will learn how to improve your essay to sharpen your voice and strengthen your message by adding details, reorganizing ideas, and making your writing clearer, so your final argument clearly reflects who you are.

Remember that revising helps you improve the big things in your essay, like your argument, evidence, and organization. Editing helps you fix the small things, like grammar, spelling, punctuation, and formatting. Both steps are important because they make your essay clearer, stronger, and easier for your reader to understand. When you revise and edit, you’re making sure your argument has the right “kick” and that your writing is ready to serve.

Revision Review

Remember that in the writing process, we briefly talked about the revision step. This is where you add details, rearrange sentences, and clarify ideas. Make sure your writing has the right consistency—balanced, smooth, and easy to follow. You're improving the taste of your writing, one fix at a time.

Revision is the process of improving your writing by making big changes to your ideas, organization, or clarity—not just fixing spelling or grammar. Revising can include:
- Adding more details or evidence
- Deleting things that don't make sense
- Rearranging paragraphs or sentences
- Make your ideas clearer and more focused
- Strengthen your word choice or transitions

You will be the judge of adding details, deleting things that don’t make sense, and strengthening your word choices. However, when rearranging your sentences or making your ideas clearer, there are three specific rules we already looked at and will review:

Explore each section in the tabs below to learn more.

Active Voice Review
Revising for Syntax Review
Parallel Structure Review

Active Voice | Video

Watch this video to review how to use active voice in your paper.

📝 Guided Notes for Video (Printable)

Revising for Syntax | Video

Watch this video to review how to revise your paper for syntax.

📝 Guided Notes for Video (Printable)

Parallel Structure Syntax - Khan Academy | Video

Watch the video below to review how to use the parallel structure in your essay.

"Parallel structure | Syntax." *Khan Academy*, uploaded by Khan Academy, August 23, 2016. Parallel structure (video) | Khan Academy

📝 Guided Notes for Video (Printable)

Editing/Proofreading Review

After revising, we know that we now have to move into editing, or proofreading, our essay. Remember that editing is your clean-up stage to check grammar, spelling, punctuation, and formatting. As we talked about before, it’s small but important. This step makes your writing polished and ready to serve.

Remember that editing includes:

- Spelling
  - Are words spelled correctly?
- Punctuation
  - Do your sentences end properly? Are commas and quotation marks used correctly?
- Capitalization
  - are names and titles capitalized?
- Grammar
  - Do verbs agree with subjects? Are pronouns correct?
- Word usage
  - Are you using the right word for what you mean?

Remember that we moved into higher-level punctuation elements to edit/proofread for:

- - - Commas
    - Colons
    - Semicolons
    - Hyphens vs. Dashes
    - Ellipses

Review Commas

View the videos below to learn more about semicolons and colons:

Review Semicolons vs Colons

View the videos below to learn more about semicolons and colons:

Intro to Semicolon
Linking with Colons
Separating with Colons

Introduction to the Semicolon - Khan Academy | Video

"Introduction to the semicolon | The Colon and semicolon | Punctuation." *Khan Academy*, uploaded by Khan Academy, 17 April 2019, Introduction to the semicolon (video) | Khan Academy.

📝 Guided Notes for Video (Printable)

Linking Function of the Colon - Khan Academy | Video

"Linking function of the colon | The Colon and semicolon | Punctuation." *Khan Academy*, uploaded by Khan Academy, 17 April 2019, Linking function of the colon (video) | Khan Academy.

📝 Guided Notes for Video (Printable)

The Colon as a Separator - Khan Academy | Video

"The colon as a separator | The colon and semicolon | Punctuation." *Khan Academy*, uploaded by Khan Academy, 17 April 2019, The colon as a separator (video) | Khan Academy.

📝 Guided Notes for Video (Printable)

Explore each section in the tabs below to learn more.

Intro to the Semicolon
Hyphens and Dashes
Ellipses

Introduction to the Semicolon - Khan Academy | Video

Watch the video below to review colons and semicolons.

Khan Academy. Introduction to the semicolon | The Colon and semicolon | Punctuation | Khan Academy. YouTube, uploaded by Khan Academy, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41XNKfR56OY.

📝 Guided Notes for Video (Printable)

Hyphens vs. Dashes - Khan Academy | Video

Watch the video below to review how to use hyphens and dashes in your essay.

Khan Academy. Hyphens vs. dashes | Punctuation | Khan Academy. YouTube, uploaded by Khan Academy, 9 years ago, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgpExkmY6Y0.

📝 Guided Notes for Video (Printable)

Ellipses - Khan Academy | Video

Watch the video below to review how to use ellipses in your essays.

Khan Academy. Ellipses | Punctuation | Khan Academy. YouTube, uploaded by Khan Academy, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmRMfFVw6NE.

📝 Guided Notes for Video (Printable)

Applying Understanding

Now that you have a completed final essay that has gone through all of the processes, use the checklist below to be 100% positive you are ready to submit!

🔗📄 Argumentative Essay Editing and Revising Checklist

Lesson recap

Argumentative writing is more than just an essay—it’s a skill you can use anytime you need to speak up, make a point, or stand for something you believe. When you learn how to build a clear claim, support it with strong evidence, and respond to the other side, you learn how to think critically and communicate with confidence. Take what you’ve learned in this module and use it beyond the classroom—because your voice matters, and strong arguments help your voice be heard.

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