Chapter 5: The Revision Process

Content is only one aspect of your document. Let’s say you were assigned a report on the sales trends for a specific product in a relatively new market. You could produce a one-page chart comparing last year’s results to current figures and call it a day, but would it clearly and concisely deliver content that is useful and correct? Are you supposed to highlight trends? Are you supposed to spotlight factors that contributed to the increase or decrease? Are you supposed to include projections for next year? Our list of questions could continue, but for now let’s focus on content and its relationship to the directions. Have you included the content that corresponds to the given assignment, left any information out that may be necessary to fulfill the expectations, or have you gone beyond the assignment directions? Content will address the central questions of who, what, where, when, why and how within the range and parameters of the assignment.

Use these tips to help with content:

• Do you need to add information readers need to understand your document? Check to see whether certain key information is missing, for example, a critical series of steps from a set of instructions, important background that helps beginners understand the main discussion, or definitions of key terms.
• Do you need to omit information your readers do not need? Unnecessary information can also confuse and frustrate readers. After all, it’s there so they feel obligated to read it.
• Do you need to add examples to help readers understand? Examples are one of the most powerful ways to connect with audiences, particularly in instructions. Even in non-instructional text, for example, when you are trying to explain a technical concept, examples are a major help, analogies in particular.

Evaluate Organization

Organization is another key aspect of any document. Standard formats that include an introduction, body, and conclusion may be part of your document, but did you decide on a direct or indirect approach? Can you tell? A direct approach will announce the main point or purpose at the beginning, while an indirect approach will present an introduction before the main point. Your document may use any of a wide variety of organizing principles, such as chronological, spatial, compare/contrast. Is your organizing principle clear to the reader? Do you have a conclusion? Does your conclusion mirror your introduction and not introduce new material?

Use these tips to help with organization:

• Do you have a strong introduction? Make sure you have a strong introduction to the entire document- one that makes clear the topic, purpose, audience, and contents of that document. And for each major section within your document, use mini-introductions that indicate at least the topic of the section and give an overview of the subtopics to be covered in that section.
• Do you need to change the organization of your information? Sometimes, you can have all the right information but arrange it in the wrong way. For example, there can be too much background information up-front (or too little) such that certain readers get lost. Sometimes, background information needs to be consolidated into the main information. For example, in instructions, it’s sometimes better to feed in chunks of background at the points where they are immediately needed.
• Do you need to strengthen transitions? Readers often have difficulty following a document if the writer makes the common error of failing to make one point relevant to the next, or to illustrate the relationships between the points. Make connections between the main sections of your report, individual paragraphs, and individual sentences much clearer by adding transition words and by echoing keywords more accurately. Words like “therefore,” “for example,” “however” are transition words; they indicate the logic connecting the previous thought to the upcoming thought.

Evaluate Style

Style is created through content and organization, but also involves word choice and grammatical structures. Is your document written in an informal or formal tone, or does it present a blend, a mix, or an awkward mismatch? Does it provide a coherent and unifying voice with a professional tone? If you are collaborating on the project with other writers or contributors, pay special attention to unifying the document across the different authors’ styles of writing. Even if they were all to write in a professional, formal style, the document may lack a consistent voice. Read it out loud. Can you tell who is writing what? If so, that is a clear clue that you need to do more revising in terms of style.

Use these tips to help with style:

• Do you need to change your sentence style? Is the sentence style targeted to the audience? In instructions, for example, using the imperative voice and “you” phrasing is vastly more understandable than the passive voice or third-personal phrasing. Passive, person-less writing is harder to read. Put people and action in your writing! Similarly, go for active verbs as opposed to be verb phrasing. All of this makes your writing more direct and immediate; readers don’t have to dig for it.
• Do you need to break up long sentences? Sentence length matters as well. An average of somewhere between 15 and 25 words per sentence is about right; sentences over 30 words can often be confusing.
• Ask yourself the following questions:
  • Does my document have repetitious words?
  • Does my document have old expressions and references?
  • Does my document have unnecessary fillers (extra unnecessary words)?
  • Does my document have slangs and clichés?
  • Does my document have parallel construction?
  • Does my document have obscured verbs?

Evaluate Readability

Readability refers to the reader’s ability to read and comprehend the document. As a business writer, your goal is to make your writing clear and concise, not complex and challenging. If your document consists of long paragraphs with no breaks, it can make your document difficult to read. The way your document is organized also gives your audience some insight into the kind of business professional you are. Remember that many times the first chance your audience has to meet you is through your writing, so making a good first impression in your writing is key.

Use these tips to help with readability:

• Did you use white space? White space is empty space on a paper. Empty space makes the document appear less cluttered and jumbled. White space doesn’t only mean adding a blank line now and then. Use heading and lists to increase white space. Search your rough drafts for ways to incorporate headings, for example, look for changes in topic or subtopic. Search your writing for listings of things; these can be made into vertical lists. Look for paired listings such as terms and their definitions; these can be made into two-column lists. Of course, be careful not to force this special formatting. Don’t overdo it.
• Did you use effective margins and font styles? Use special typography and work with margins, line length, line spacing, type size, and type style. You can do things like making the lines shorter (bringing in the margins), using larger type sizes, and other such tactics. Certain type styles are believed to be friendlier and more readable than others.

Format

Format is an important part of the revision process. Format involves the design expectations of the author and audience. If a letter format normally requires a date at the top or the sender’s address on the left side of the page before the salutation, the information should be in the correct location. Formatting that is messy or fails to conform to the company style will reflect poorly on you before the reader even starts to read it. By presenting a document that is properly formatted according to the expectations of your organization and your readers, you will start off making a good impression.

Facts

Another key part of the revision process is checking your facts. Did you know that news organizations and magazines employ professional fact-checkers? These workers are responsible for examining every article before it gets published and consulting original sources to make sure the information in the article is accurate. This can involve making phone calls to the people who were interviewed for the article—for example, “Mr. Diaz, our report states that you are thirty-nine years old. Our article will be published on the fifteenth. Will that be your correct age on that date?” Fact-checking also involves looking facts up in encyclopedias, directories, atlases, and other standard reference works; and, increasingly, in online sources.

While you can’t be expected to have the skills of a professional fact-checker, you do need to reread your writing with a critical eye to the information in it. Inaccurate content can expose you and your organization to liability and will create far more work than a simple revision of a document. So, when you revise a document, ask yourself the following:

• Does my writing contain any statistics or references that need to be verified?
• Where can I get reliable information to verify it?

It is often useful to do independent verification—that is, look up the fact in a different source from the one where you first got it.

Names

Spelling

Correct spelling is another element essential for your credibility, and errors will be glaringly obvious to many readers. The negative impact on your reputation as a writer, and its perception that you lack attention to detail or do not value your work, will be hard to overcome. In addition to the negative personal consequences, spelling errors can become factual errors and destroy the value of content. This may lead you to click the “spell check” button in your word processing program, but computer spell-checking is not enough. Spell checkers have improved in the years since they were first invented, but they are not infallible. They can and do make mistakes.

Typically, your incorrect word may in fact be a word, and therefore, according to the program, correct. For example, suppose you wrote, “The major will attend the meeting” when you meant to write “The mayor will attend the meeting.” The program would miss this error because “major” is a word, but your meaning would be twisted beyond recognition.

Punctuation

Punctuation marks are the traffic signals, signs, and indications that allow us to navigate the written word. They serve to warn us in advance when a transition is coming or the complete thought has come to an end. A period indicates the thought is complete, while a comma signals that additional elements or modifiers are coming. Correct signals will help your reader follow the thoughts through sentences and paragraphs, and enable you to communicate with maximum efficiency while reducing the probability of error (Strunk, 1979).

Figure 5.1 “Punctuation Marks” lists twelve punctuation marks that are commonly used in English in alphabetical order along with an example of each.

^{Figure 5.1 | Punctuation Marks}

It may be daunting to realize that the number of possible punctuation errors is as extensive as the number of symbols and constructions available to the author. Software programs may catch many punctuation errors, but again it is the committed writer that makes the difference. Here we will provide details on how to avoid mistakes with three of the most commonly used punctuation marks: the comma, the semicolon, and the apostrophe.

Grammar

Learning to use good, correct standard English grammar is more of a practice than an event or even a process. Grammar involves the written construction of meaning from words and involves customs that evolve and adapt to usage over time. Because grammar is always evolving, none of us can sit back and rest assured that we “know” how to write with proper grammar. Instead, it is important to write and revise with close attention to grammar, keeping in mind that grammatical errors can undermine your credibility, reflect poorly on your employer, and cause misunderstandings.

Jean Wyrick has provided a list of common errors in grammar to watch out for, which we have adapted here for easy reference (Wyrick, 2008). In each case, the error is in italics and the [correct form] is italicized within square brackets.