Revising and Editing
The steps for a better story
Looking Over Your Story
Revising and editing is basically just checking to see if your story or essay is the best it can be. Editing means to look at your spelling, grammar and punctuation; revising is looking at your whole story to see that it has all the elements of a story plot, a good beginning, middle, and end, a hooking introduction and word choice.
Revising
When revising, you should always remember exactly what your story does and doesn't need. I t makes things much easier. From there, you can do these things to make sure your story is at its best and most interesting:
- Get rid of modifiers (a lot, good, very, nice...).
- Change the first word in a sentence if it is already used to start another sentence 2 times in a paragraph. It makes your sentences not start with the same word over and over again, like "I" or "The".
- Use sensory language when describing your setting.
- Have as much necessary dialogue as possible.
- Use transition words to help your reader flow through your story/essay. (Suddenly, as soon as, later on...).
Editing
Things to look for when you edit your story/essay:
- Correct spelling.
- Quotation marks where they are needed (dialogue).
- Correct punctuation (?, !, .,).
- Capitalization.
- Good grammar (using all the previous steps when they are needed).