The Writing Process: Editing Guide © S. Ingraham: lightshedder.com

An editor (someone else, with the power to accept or reject, who looks at your work) edits for content, style, and standard English usage. When you edit your own work, or the work of a peer, you are primarily looking for standard English usage (if it is your own work you will probably make revisions in content as you go along). Things to look for:

• Anything that doesn’t sound right (catches grammatical, punctuation, and structure errors). Sub vocalize as you read. Mouth the words. Let your tongue and ear guide you.
  
  
• Anything that doesn’t look right (catches spelling and capitalization errors, paragraphing, and occasionally quotation marks). Read backwards to catch the most spelling errors. Scan rapidly for Capitals.
  

Specific checklist:

• Capitalization (proper names and nouns, beginning of sentences)
  
  
• Sentence fragments (every sentence needs both an actor and an action) Especially check any sentance that begins with “and,” “but,” “then,” “than,” “becasue,” or “since.”
  
  
• Run-0ns (and and and, but but but, ,,,,,,)
  
  
• End punctuation: periods, !, ? (check for ? especially)
  
  
• Internal punctuation: every pause needs punctuation, generally a comma; check punctuated pauses guide for other usages.
  
  
• Agreement (actor and action should agree in number, actions should all be one tense unless you make an obvious change in time, pronouns should agree in number (and sex where appropriate) with the noun they replace)
  
  
• Pronouns that make the reader stop to figure out who (or what) you are talking about.
  
  
• Quotation marks: words spoken or thought as speech are in “quotation marks,” (other punctuation goes inside the “;” quotations are set off from the rest of the sentence with a comma. The only other time you would use quotation marks is when you could insert the words “so called” in front of the word or words in quotation marks.
  
  
• Paragraphs (change of subject or speaker=new paragraph)
  
  
• Spelling
  
  
• MSLRs: F. I can write and speak using the conventions of standard written and spoken English.