Editing Your Writing | Self-Editing Checklists

Editing is one of the most important parts of writing a story, a poem, or an essay. Editing is used to polish writing and it is important to go back and revise to be more successful. We have provided you with all of the tips to editing a story and a few bonus parts such as peer reviewing and an story components checklist.

Checklists:

These checklists hold everything (in our opinion) needed to make a good story. These points will help the writer to make sure their story makes sense, flows smoothly, and follows grammar rules.

Story Components Checklist

• Theme: Do you have a central theme which the story revolves around

• Setting: Do you have a defined place and time in your story?

• Character: Did you define and develop your characters? What do they look like? Age? Personality?

• Point of View: Do you have a constant person narrating the story? Is the whole story written in the same tense?

• Plot: Did you order the main events correctly? Do you have all of the elements in a story?

• Tone and Style: Did you use the proper tone in your writing? Does the tone align with the characters and setting?

• Ending: Do you have a proper ending? Check out one of our previous posts that go into depth about story and poem endings at this link.

Grammatical Checklist

• Punctuation: Did you use punctuation correctly? This includes punctuation within quotations.

• Spelling: Did you check the spelling of all the words?

• Commas: Did you properly use the commas? Remember, commas are used in addresses, after introductory clauses, items in a series, and more.

• Capitalization: Did you properly capitalize the beginning of sentences? Proper nouns?

• Dialogue: Did you use quotation marks in the correct places while using dialogue?

• Sentence Variety: Do your sentences have different lengths? Did you get rid of run-on sentences?

• Word Usage: Did you use mature and unique vocabulary that fit into context?

Peer review:

Students, you can post your writing in either the form (on the home page form) between the pen2paper editors or publicly as a comment for all to see on this blog. Others can view and give comments to your writing. We may also start making videos to go over writing pieces whether written by us or by others, only with their permission, for viewers to listen and give feedback.

Thank you for reading! Submit your stories or poems for peer editing or to our weekly Student Writing Features (due ech Sunday) by going to the form on our home page! A special thank you to my new anonymous writer who came up with the idea for this post which we worked on together.