I have a rule I come back to in almost every revision workshop: revise first, then edit. It sounds obvious until I ask how many people in the room edit as they draft, and most hands go up. The two activities feel like the same thing because both involve changing words on a page. They’re not. Revision is about re-seeing the argument. Editing is about correctness. Doing them simultaneously means you’re polishing sentences you might delete, and attending to surface errors stops you from seeing structural ones.
The distinction that matters is between higher-order and lower-order concerns. Higher-order: is the argument clear, is the evidence sufficient, does the structure hold? Lower-order: are there typos, is the formatting consistent, is the citation style correct? Work through higher-order concerns completely before touching lower-order ones. This feels inefficient when you’re tired of a draft and want to feel like you’re fixing something. Over the course of a writing project, it saves a lot of time.
One of the most useful tools I’ve found for revision is the reverse outline: after you’ve written a draft, go paragraph by paragraph and write one sentence describing what each paragraph actually does. Not what you intended it to do. What it does. The result is diagnostic. You can see immediately whether paragraphs are out of order, whether any one is doing too many things, whether there’s a gap in the logic. Most people outline before they write. The Reverse outline is for after, when you have real text to evaluate instead of intentions.
The question I ask students who’ve been revising for a while is: when do you stop? There’s an answer. You stop when a colleague can accurately summarize your argument. You stop when you find yourself making the same small word changes back and forth. You stop when you’re only attending to lower-order concerns. At that point, editing is appropriate and revision is done. This isn’t finished-finished. It just means the draft is doing its job and you can put it down.