Revise, edit and proofread

Writing is an iterative process, which means that you may produce several drafts of a piece of work.

When you write your first draft you need to be free to explore, develop and try out new ideas and approaches. Your work will grow naturally and will be less structured and more expansive. Worrying too much about making your first draft perfect may slow your progress and restrict your thinking. You can refine your writing later on.

The process of checking and improving your writing is an important part of your learning and development. Spending time thinking about the best way to structure and communicate your ideas helps you process the information you’ve learned, organise your points logically, and clarify your argument. Although revising, editing and proofreading can feel difficult and time-consuming at first, it gets easier with practice and will help you feel more confident as a communicator in your discipline. 

It is important that you leave time to revise, edit and proofread your writing. We suggest that you:

• build it into your overall plan and timings;
• leave a day between each stage of the process so you can look again at the content with fresh eyes;
• save each draft of your work as a separate document, so that you have a record of the whole writing and editing process and can easily go back to a previous version if needed; and
• try to read your writing from your audience's point of view.

Asking others for help  

It’s important to be mindful of the University’s Proof Reading Policy when you are thinking about the revising, editing and proofreading process. The Policy states that you can show your work to others (for example, your supervisor, your module tutors, or even friends, family or fellow students), but they can only offer “peer review”. This means they can offer comments and advice on the content, logic, flow or clarity of your work, but they are not allowed to rewrite or correct your work for you. You should still be able to say that your work is entirely your own when you submit it, so you should take the responsibility for making changes and improvements to it.  

If you are considering asking a generative AI chatbot to provide “peer review”-style feedback on your work, remember that it will not have any understanding of the context or specific requirements of your particular assessment, and may not provide appropriate feedback (for example, it could suggest changes to structure, language or style that are not common in UK higher education assessments, or tell you to include information that is not relevant for your topic). You should always carefully consider any information from generative AI tools, and make your own decisions about what (if anything) you will do as a result of their feedback. Remember as well that if your assessment brief does not specifically say you can use generative AI for this purpose, you should not use it. Ask your module leader if you are not sure what you are allowed to use generative AI for in your assessment.