writershelp

Editing sentences and paragraphs

When you are satisfied with your global revisions, you can focus on individual sentences for the following:

Clear, concise sentence structure
Appropriate word choice
Grammar issues, such as agreement or placement of modifiers
Punctuation
Capitalization, abbreviations, and so on

Here is a draft paragraph edited for a variety of sentence-level problems.

ORIGINAL PARAGRAPH

Although some cities have found creative ways to improve access to public transportation for physically handicapped passengers, and to fund other programs, there have been problems in our city due to the need to address budget constraints and competing needs. This has led citizens to question how funds are distributed? For example, last year when city officials had to choose between allocating funds for accessible transportation or allocating funds to after school programs, they voted for the after school programs. It is not clear why these are more important.

Edited paragraph

Revised paragraph

The original paragraph was flawed by wordiness, a problem that can be addressed through any number of revisions.

Some of the paragraph’s improvements are not open to debate and must be fixed in any revision.

The hyphen in after-school programs is necessary.
A noun must be substituted for the pronoun these in the last sentence.
The question mark in the second sentence must be changed to a period.

Example of sentence-level revisions