Editing & Revision Essay Checklist
High School Students Can Revise and Edit Essays for Better Grades
Middle and high school teachers who provide students with a helpful writing and revising checklist can expect higher quality persuasive essays.
Whether you are writing a high school essay or a college term paper, using a writing checklist can help you dramatically improve your final grade. Students should keep this checklist handy and review it before turning in their next paper. Teachers can offer this checklist to their middle and high school students and use it to guide class discussion for improving persuasive essays.
Revision
Revising your writing involves looking at the structure of your essay and making major changes, such as reorganizing paragraphs or restructuring the progression of ideas to maximize the effectiveness of your essay. Think of revision as tackling the big picture aspects of your essay.
Persuasive Essay Revision Checklist
- Does the beginning capture the reader’s attention?
- Does the introductory paragraph lead into the thesis statement?
- Does the thesis statement clearly argue from one position?
- Does the thesis statement list your three principal arguments?
- Do the examples support one of the principal arguments?
- Is the writing focused & clear?
- Is the writing organized logically? (cause/effect; chronological; example/analysis)
- Do the details fit the chosen topic?
- Are the details sufficiently described?
- Did you delete details that do not relate to the topic?
- Are there any details that should be added to make the writing clearer?
- Does the writing include sensory details (taste, touch, sight, sound) & vivid images?
- Are ideas and details connected with sophisticated transitions?
- Is the choice of words fresh, colorful, & interesting?
- Have any words been unnecessarily repeated?
- Have weak, general words been replaced with detailed terms?
Editing
Writers edit their work to polish up a nearly-finished product. This fine-tuning process should be initiated after you have finished revising. Think of it as cleaning up your work for publication.
Essay Editing Checklist
- I have corrected misspellings.
- I have corrected punctuation error (commas, colons, semicolons, end punctuation)
- My writing contains correct capitalization of sentences & proper nouns.
- All of the verbs agree with their subjects.
- All of the pronouns & their antecedents agree.
- I have no misplaced modifiers.
- I have used apostrophes correctly with possessives.
- I have written sentences using parallel structure.
- I have eliminated all fragments.
- I have eliminated all run-on sentences.
- I have used all words correctly.
- I have checked for commonly misused homonyms (there, their, they’re; to, too, two; threw, through)
- I have eliminated passive voice whenever possible.
- I have varied my sentence structure so the writing uses a mix of sentence types:
- Begin with a subordinating conjunction.
- Join independent clauses with a semicolon.
- Use complex sentence structure.
- Use short & long sentences
Once students have familiarized themselves with the revision and editing process, they will realize it is a vital step in writing a persuasive essay.
