Editing for Clarity Checklist

Clear writing is rarely clear on the first draft. This checklist helps you revise with purpose: instead of rereading everything at once, you inspect your text one issue at a time, so each pass has a specific focus.

Grammar: word choice, word order, parts of speech, ambiguous parts of speech, forking paths, and parallel structures.

Cohesion and coherence: references, topic, prior knowledge, nominalizations, information flow, and relationships between ideas.

Each item comes with a short example of the problem and the fix.

Use it when:

• Revising your own drafts
• Editing or reviewing someone else’s text
• Preparing a source text for translation
• Teaching clear writing