Composition, revising, and editing: complete overview - STAAR English I

Composition, revising, and editing is the fourth major skill area on the STAAR English I assessment. STAAR presents a student draft and asks you to improve it: revising questions target meaning and structure, editing questions target correctness. This site breaks the area into five skills. This overview maps the five skills, how STAAR tests them, and how they connect to the essay.

The five composition skills

Each skill helps you improve a draft or your own writing.

• Revising for clarity and organization. Improving meaning, development, order, and transitions. See revising for clarity and organization.
• Editing for grammar and usage. Fixing agreement, pronoun case, verb tense, and modifiers. See editing for grammar and usage.
• Sentence boundaries and punctuation. Fixing fragments, run-ons, comma splices, and using commas, semicolons, and apostrophes. See sentence boundaries and punctuation.
• Word choice and precision. Choosing precise, appropriate words and correcting confused words. See word choice and precision.
• The revising and editing question types. Reading the prompt to tell a meaning fix from a correctness fix. See the revising and editing question types.

The thread through every skill: match the fix to the task

The habit that runs through this area is matching your fix to what the question asks. A revising question wants the clearest, best-organized option, even when every choice is grammatical; an editing question wants the one that corrects the error. Reading the prompt verb ("combine," "delete," "what change should be made") and the options tells you which standard to apply. The same conventions you fix in editing are scored on the ECR, so the skills carry straight into the essay.

How STAAR tests composition

• A student draft with numbered sentences anchors the questions.
• Revising questions ask to combine, reorder, add, delete, or choose a transition (meaning and structure).
• Editing questions ask "what change should be made," with options that alter grammar, punctuation, or spelling (correctness).
• The redesigned item formats apply (for example, an editing fix or a best-combination choice).
• The same conventions are scored on the ECR's Use of Conventions trait.

How to study composition

1. Separate revising from editing in your mind: meaning and structure versus correctness.
2. Learn the recurring grammar errors (agreement, case, tense, modifiers) and their correct forms.
3. Master sentence boundaries (fragments, run-ons, comma splices) and the three fixes.
4. Practice precise word choice and the high-frequency confused words (their/there/they're, affect/effect).
5. Read the prompt verb on every question so you apply the right standard, then carry the habit into proofreading your ECR.

For the official exam materials

TEA publishes released STAAR tests, the constructed-response rubrics, and information on the item types on the STAAR Reading Language Arts resources page and the STAAR redesign page. Always practice from released revising and editing sets, because the question formats and conventions are set by TEA.