ABSTRACT
This chapter covers strategies for revising, editing, and proofreading that you can use to produce a well-written and mechanically-perfect document. Most writers and writing educators emphasise the importance of revising and editing by insisting that ‘writing is rewriting’. They will tell you that writing is a process of discovering what you want to say and that you should write with the intention of revising. Many people say that the only way that they can think is to jot their thoughts down. Writers who believe that writing is a matter of forming whole sentences in their heads and then capturing these sentences on paper are misguided. The ‘editorial loop’ is a methodical strategy whereby you put your document through several ‘pass throughs’, looking at a different aspect of it each time. The first pass through considers the overall structure; the final pass through checks whether the pages are all there, the right way up, and in the right order.
