It’s hard enough to establish some kind of authority as a GA or TA without those dreaded, glaring spelling mistakes that we all commit from time to time.

Yes, like Kathleen Wynne before me, I’ve recently been guilty of a few grammatical goof-ups and spelling snafus. For someone who has taught writing and copyedited for academic publications, there is no worse feeling than when one of these incidents happens in a public place, in front of students, or *gasp* in front of supervisors. As many of you have probably found in your roles as GAs and TAs, these types of slip-ups are extra embarrassing when you’re trying to prove that you are knowledgeable enough to advise others.

The problem is that, just like the famous saying about bowel movements, everybody goofs on grammar and spelling from time to time. Ernest Hemingway, for instance, couldn’t have cared less about either, and thousands of magazines and news stories are published with the most splendidly heinous errors every week. But while few question Hemingway’s authority based on his spelling ability, your own language skills can drastically affect your credibility in the classroom. In short: spelling mistakes happen, but they can be prevented by committing to strong revision practices that lead to good editing habits.

Revision

There is more to revision than just editing or proofreading. Revision is about reconsidering intentions and matching them to actions – in this case matching an intended message to the resulting piece of writing.  Blau and Burak (2012) suggest that there are five steps to revision that range from the ideological (Refocusing) to the mechanical (Editing and Proofreading):

Refocusing

This is typically where you would revisit the original purpose for writing and assess whether your written work achieves that aim. You might list off the points you wanted to make and compare them to your current presentation, noting where ideas were missed, altered, or incomplete.

Reordering

There are many different positions on effective ordering. Some writers suggest opening the body of your writing with the strongest point that supports your position, while others suggest leading with your second strongest point and reserving your strongest for last. Some compositions focus on sequential events or processes, and will therefore have a natural order. Whatever the case, reordering is about assessing the arrangement of paragraphs (and even the sentences within those paragraphs) and determining whether they demonstrate the progression of ideas in a way that best supports the writer’s position/purpose.

Adding and Cutting

When reviewing a piece of writing, it is also important to assess the level of detail being presented and its appropriateness. What is appropriate will depend on the realities of the medium, the awareness or abilities of the audience, and any other imposed limits such as word counts. Adding should be used when an idea requires additional information in order for your audience to understand it as you intended. Cutting, as suggested, should be used to remove unnecessary information, repetition, redundancies, and even inefficient language.

Editing and Proofreading

So often this type of revision is reduced to spellcheck programs and grammar issues. These concerns certainly play a part in editing and proofreading, but stylistic concerns are equally as important. By “stylistic concerns” I mean the particular requirements of a genre, publication, institution, or audience. The requirements may pertain to layout, language use, spelling, citation style, or any other issue. Issues such as sentence variety, parallelism, transitions, and clutter-free syntax are also things to watch for at this stage.

 ***Notice that each stage gradually moves through different levels of analysis from macro to micro.***

Proofreading Strategies

Spellcheck is all well and good, but it’s useless when it comes to context. That means that your spellcheck program won’t be able to tell the difference between describing your teacher as “foul” or “fowl” (though the difference is pretty important). That’s why productive proofreading starts with the writer. Technology aside, there are some strategies even seasoned veterans rely on when performing final proofreads:

Reading aloud. It may sound silly, and you probably won’t be comfortable doing it in public at first, but reading your work aloud is one of the best ways to identify awkward syntax, shifts in tense, and even subject-verb agreement. When you read in your head, your brain will often correct these types of errors, ignoring redundant phrases and adding missing words/letters. Enunciating carefully can often trigger our innate sense of “proper” grammar. When and if you do find an element that needs correcting, be on the lookout: Gibson (1989) warns that we are most likely to miss mistakes that immediately follow each other.

Reading with a partner, alternating for each sentence. Alternating breaks the momentum we often gain while reading our own work that sometimes causes us to skim, misread, or overlook errors that are clear when we read sentence by sentence. The addition of a separate reader also theoretically keeps the process on task. Read from start to finish, and then finish to start, sentence by sentence. Reading backwards is another way to disrupt momentum and focus on each syntactical unit. Keep a list of common errors to help you narrow your search in future reads.

Practice reader response with a partner. As those of you who have ever participated in book reviews, peer review, or critiques will know, there is no greater test for a piece of writing than to have it analyzed by other, informed readers. Having a partner read and respond to your text can offer important critical insight. In order to reach that insight, however, your partners will have to review your writing meticulously. Reader response will often, then, provide grammatical and syntactical suggestions as a welcome side-effect of critical engagement.

Each of these strategies is designed to isolate your writing at the word, sentence, and paragraph level in order to consider how they all work together as a whole. Those suggestions that require a partner are also a good opportunity to gauge how successful you have been in expressing your original idea.

References

Blau, Susan and Kathryn Burak. Writing in the Works. 3rd ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2012.

Gibson, Martin L. The Writer’s Friend*:*And A Companion For Copy Editors And Others Who Work With Publications. Ames : Iowa State University Press, 1989.

Information in this post has been adapted for the University of Windsor’s Writing Support Desk’s presentation entitled “Editing and Revision”.