Few writing terms are as misunderstood as the term editing.

Although editing chores are often lumped together with revision in everyday conversation, the two writing terms refer to distinctly different activities.

Revision is a big-scale project, like remodeling the kitchen. Editing is more like cleaning house.

Efficient editors do three housekeeping jobs:

• They toss the junk (simplify).

• Clean what they are keeping (correct).

• Arrange items so they show to advantage (format).

When teaching beginning writers, it's easiest to teach revision and editing as separate activities.

Writing terms #1: Simplify

Simplifying writing is largely a matter of finding the most precise common word that will convey the writer's meaning. Simple writing is uncluttered writing. It does not keep every adjective it got for 25¢ at the library yard sale.

Simplifying often includes writing shorter sentences. When beginning writers are told to supply more details, they stuff them into their sentences with a string of coordinating conjunctions.

Writing is usually clearer when students break rambling sentences into shorter ones. Also, it's easier for beginners to spot errors in the shorter sentences.

Students who write on a computer have an easy way of finding candidates for shortening.

Writing terms #2: Correct

Students must correct their spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Correcting means fixing things that are wrong rather than fiddling with things that are OK.

Spelling. Besides ordinary misspelling, students must correct computerized bad spelling such as gr8r. My spell checker says that spelling is acceptable, but a college admission committee may disagree.

Spell-check also won't help with homophones or typos that produce correctly spelled — but wrong — words.

We need to see that students memorize the correct use of any of the sets of confusable terms that give them difficulty. That's a job that will make you wish for retirement.

Grammar & punctuation. The G&P errors we and our students need to worry about are the problem areas that crop up regularly in student writing. These are a different list of issues than typically tested by standardized tests.

It is much easier to get students to correct their own work if you give them a short list of specific errors to eliminate from their writing for your class. Ideally, you should tailor your list to your students (individually, if possible) rather than grabbing a list from the web.

Writing terms #3: Format

After students have cleaned up their writing, they need to be sure it is in the correct format for the assignment.

The format includes the layout, showing the size and placement of elements such as margins, titles, and paragraphs.

A style guide, like Turabian or MLA, gets into the nitty-gritty of formatting. It will not only tell details like where to put citations, but also where to put commas and periods within the citations.

Checklists for editing apply these writing terms. Similar checklists for revision put theory into practice.