Revising and editing on the Ohio English II test: complete overview - Ohio's State Test for ELA II

Revising and editing are tested on Ohio's State Test for English Language Arts II through items that hand you a draft and ask you to improve it. Revising works on clarity, development, and organization; editing fixes grammar and mechanics. This site breaks the skill into five dot points, from revising for organization to the item formats themselves. This overview maps the five skills, how they connect, and how to study them.

The five revising and editing skills

Each skill improves a draft, either its ideas or its surface.

• Revising for clarity and organization. Adding a transition or detail, deleting an off-point sentence, reordering ideas, choosing the best placement. See revising for clarity and organization.
• Editing for grammar and usage. Correcting agreement, tense, parallelism, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling by spotting the one convention an item turns on. See editing for grammar and usage.
• Sentence boundaries and combining. Fixing run-ons, comma splices, and fragments, and combining choppy sentences with coordination, subordination, or punctuation. See sentence boundaries and combining.
• Word choice and precision. Replacing vague or wordy phrasing with precise words, cutting redundancy, matching connotation, and keeping tone consistent. See word choice and precision.
• Revising and editing item types. Working drop-down, hot-text, drag-and-drop, and multiple-choice formats efficiently. See revising and editing item types.

The thread through every skill: clarity and conventions

Two ideas run through all five skills. The first is the revising-editing distinction: revising changes the ideas, development, and organization of a draft, while editing fixes its grammar and mechanics. Knowing which kind of change an item asks for tells you what to look for. The second is context: whatever the format, the best answer is the one that makes the whole sentence or paragraph clearer, better organized, or correct, not the one that looks right alone. Revising sharpens meaning and structure; editing cleans the surface; sentence combining and word choice do both; and the item formats are just the interface. Because these are the same conventions scored under Conventions of Standard English on the extended response, the whole module strengthens your writing too.

How revising and editing are tested

• Drop-down menus: pick the best version of a word, phrase, or punctuation from options embedded in the paragraph.
• Hot-text: click the sentence or word that contains an error or best completes the task.
• Drag-and-drop: place a sentence in the best location, testing organization.
• Multiple choice: choose the best correction or replacement from four options.

How to study revising and editing

1. Learn the distinction. Revising changes ideas and structure; editing fixes grammar and mechanics.
2. Name the convention. For editing items, find the one rule at stake (agreement, tense, punctuation, a boundary error) and apply it.
3. Practice combining. Join choppy sentences with coordination and subordination so the relationship between ideas is clear.
4. Sharpen word choice. Aim for precision, concision, the right connotation, and a consistent tone.
5. Know the formats. Get comfortable with drop-down, hot-text, and drag-and-drop so the interface never costs you a mark.

For the official exam materials

ODEW publishes practice tests and information on the ELA II assessment and Ohio's Learning Standards, including the Language strand behind these conventions. See the ELA II course resources page and the assessments for English language arts page. Always study from the current released materials, because the item types and standards are set by ODEW.