Revising and editing on LEAP English I and II: complete overview - Louisiana

Revising and editing is one of the core areas tested on the LEAP English I and II assessment, and it does double duty: the items reward these skills directly, and the same skills are scored in the conventions and written-expression dimensions of the writing rubrics. This site breaks the area into five dot points. This overview maps the five skills, how they connect, and how to study them.

The five revising and editing skills

Each skill is a kind of improvement you make to a draft.

• Revising for clarity and organization. Improving focus, development, and organization, choosing transitions, ordering ideas, and cutting irrelevant material. See revising for clarity and organization.
• Editing for grammar and usage. Fixing agreement, tense, pronoun, and modifier errors. See editing for grammar and usage.
• Sentence boundaries and combining. Fixing comma splices, run-ons, and fragments, and combining choppy sentences. See sentence boundaries and combining.
• Word choice and precision. Choosing precise words, cutting wordiness, and matching tone and connotation. See word choice and precision.
• Revising and editing item types. Reading the item formats and telling a revising question from an editing question. See revising and editing item types.

The thread through every skill: revising versus editing, and twice scored

Two ideas tie the area together. The first is the revising-versus-editing distinction: revising improves content and clarity, editing fixes mechanics, and reading the question stem tells you which improvement a question wants. The second is twice scored: these are the same skills the writing rubrics reward, focus and organization in written expression, conventions in the Knowledge of Language and Conventions dimension, so practicing them lifts your own writing too. Revising shapes meaning, editing fixes correctness, and both feed the rubric.

How the revising and editing skills are tested

• Best-revision multiple choice: which change most improves the paragraph (a transition, a deletion, a reorder, a correction).
• Underlined-portion items: judge whether the underlined words have an error and choose the best correction, or "NO CHANGE."
• Technology-enhanced items: drag-and-drop a sentence into place, or hot-text the part to change or the sentence that does not belong.
• The writing rubrics: the same focus, organization, sentence control, and word choice are scored on every prose response.

How to study revising and editing

1. Learn revising versus editing. Read the question stem to tell which improvement a question wants.
2. Drill the high-frequency conventions. Agreement (including indefinite pronouns), tense, modifiers, and sentence boundaries.
3. Practice combining and precision. Merge choppy sentences and choose exact, concise words.
4. Be ready for NO CHANGE. Sometimes the underlined portion is already correct.
5. Build a proofreading pass. Apply the same checks to your own prose responses to protect the conventions score.

For the official exam materials

LDOE publishes the LEAP 2025 Assessment Guide for English I and English II, practice tests, and the Louisiana Student Standards. See the LEAP 2025 Assessment Guide for English I and English II and the Louisiana Student Standards page. Always study from the current released materials, because the item types and standards are set by LDOE.