eview.

Revision is the step where the writer with make amends or corrections to their writing. Thorough writers will go through their writing multiple times to revise before moving onto the editing and proofreading. There is a difference between revision and editing however: revising removes, adds, moves and substitutes words while editing includes capitalization, punctuation, usage and spelling. The idea of “starting large and ending small” is a great way to look at revision and editing. When it comes to editing, we often rely on grammar checkers, thesauruses, and spell check. Although these resources are extremely handy- they are not always reliable. It is encouraged to use these resources but also to your own knowledge to check. Products like Microsoft Office and Grammarly can often misinterpret our writing and correct it incorrectly. It is always a good idea for the writer to go back themselves and check for spelling and grammar mistakes (Proctor). A computer can be a great teaching and research tool, a distraction, or even a waste of resources completely if it doesn’t do the job it was meant to do in the first place. Research for writing has been greatly facilitated and improved by technology, but it is still not perfect (Bruce p 149).

Second to last comes proofreading. Proofreading is the final stage of the writing itself. Proofing a paper takes times and is recommended to be done several times before submitting a final piece of work. A common mistake with proofreading is proofreading a paper while the writer is still writing the draft. Many students and writers fail to notice surface errors and issues in their own writing because as Mina Shaughnessy mentioned in Errors and Expectations, students see what they mean to say instead of what they meant to write (Shaughnessy p 395). Proofreading is not only a writing skill; but a reading skill as well. Oddly enough, proofreading is a reading skill that requires a deliberate attempt to counteract the “normal” process of reading. If a student does not realize this change to their generic reading process- her or she will no doubt continue to read rather than proofread (Harris p 464).

Proofreading is also related to reading since both are inhibited by short term memory. Studies have shown that the number of things we can remember in short term is between three to five items. It is because of this small limit that students and writers are responsible for the amount of errors they generally find in the first round of work. Harris gives a great example of this saying: “If the subject and verb of a sentence are separated by more than seven words, the verb frequently does not agree with the subject because the writer was unable to hold the subject in short term memory until the verb was written.” Even the most ex