Teaching Students to Edit

Editing is a valuable skill for college graduates, but what curriculum works for teaching students how to edit?

Employers value editing skills when hiring college graduates; however, instructors seeking to teach students to edit may struggle to know what curriculum will help their students learn best. Some college instructors may assume that students naturally improve their editing skills just by writing more papers. But others may want to take a more proactive approach.

THE RESEARCH

In her article “Instructional Interventions for Improving Proofreading and Editing Skills of College Students,” Marcella F. Enos addresses this desire by testing whether intentional teaching strategies could improve students’ editing and proofreading abilities. This study used a pretest–postest design, which provided quantifiable data to show improvement. After the pretest, Enos investigated whether an instructional intervention could improve her students’ editing and proofreading skills (Enos 2010, 268–70).

Enos’s main experimental student group consisted of first-semester college students in a beginner-level business communication course.

Enos’s instructional intervention included teaching the students how to use dictionaries and reference manuals, recognizing sentence-structure issues, and applying grammar rules. This instruction formed a foundation of understanding for editing readings, handouts, and worksheets for student practice. These worksheets were reviewed in small groups, and students were expected to be accountable and answer questions in class. This accountability enabled students to lead their own individual instruction. Assessments were given throughout the semester that required students to use dictionaries and reference manuals, reflecting the work done in a professional environment (Enos 2010, 270–271).

The results indicated that the students demonstrated significant improvement in their ability to detect errors. Specifically, on the pretest, the students’ mean score was 27.5. With an increase of 5.9, the students’ mean posttest score was 33.4 (Enos 2012, 277). Rather than simply revising for content, at the end of the semester, students appeared more capable of identifying surface-level issues such as punctuation, spelling, and formatting mistakes.

Enos’s findings indicate that editing accuracy may increase when instructors provide direct practice and feedback. The study suggests that editing skills can be taught deliberately rather than assumed to develop naturally (Enos 2010, 266–67).

THE IMPLICATIONS

This study’s results indicate that editing and proofreading skills can improve through guided practice and repeated exposure to errors. For editing instructors, this suggests that editing is a teachable skill, and structured coursework can significantly improve error detection. Rather than expecting students to self-edit effectively, feedback and reference-tool training, combined with real-world editing exercises, are critical for improvement. 

Employers value college graduates with strong writing and editing skills; errors in writing damage credibility, and employers expect writers to be able to self-edit their workplace documents. As Enos writes in her article, “Faculty from every college should consider ways to improve their teaching of writing, editing, and proofreading skills to their students” (280). Using Enos’s instructional strategies, other instructors can teach editing skills in many other courses beyond business communication to prepare college graduates for greater success in the workplace. Enos’s study ultimately calls instructors to move beyond assuming improvement will come to instead focusing on explicit editing instruction, creating more capable editors and writers with more efficient editing processes.

To learn more about editing instruction, read the full article:

Enos, Marcella F. 2010. “Instructional Interventions for Improving Proofreading and Editing Skills of College Students.” Business Communication Quarterly 73 (3): 265–81. https://doi.org/10.1177/1080569910376535.

—McKenzie VanOrden, Editing Research

FEATURE IMAGE BY RDNE STOCK PROJECT

Find more research

Take a look at Kira Christensen’s Editing Research article for more information on why typos can destroy credibility: “Perfect Is Better than Done.”

Read Amelia Anderson’s Editing Research article to learn more about other important elements of teaching students how to edit: “Teaching Inclusivity in Editing: Time for a Change?”

Check out R. DerMont Bell, T. D. Stoddard, D. J. Perry, and M. L. Waters’s (1994) article to learn how teaching small groups of students how to edit can improve their skills: “Using Small Groups to Develop Editing Skills.” Bulletin of the Association for Business Communication 57 (2): 50–52. https://doi.org/10.1177/108056999405700209.