Editing Vs. Revising

While exploring the Williams reading, I was furiously scribbling in the margins. These were mostly notes about how his sweeping generalizations and absolutist rhetoric annoyed me, but a few were about good points he made. One of these notes stemmed from his argument about the confusion between revising and editing. As I was growing up, these words seemed interchangeable. It was all the same idea... actually taking the time to read over your work and change it for the better. There was never any discussion about what elements were more or less important. It always included editing, often including revising as well.
The though that these are two different entities with different aims really caught me off guard. I am generally very careful about my sentence structure. Having sentences in my work that don't accurately convey my thoughts is totally unacceptable (That sentence alone just took me 3 minutes.) Perhaps it is because I've internalized many of the editing processes (or externalized them through Microsoft Word,) but editing never seems to be much of a concern to me nowadays. When I was in high school however, this is where I spent the majority of my time. The idea of revising (prior to editing) seemed odd... "My teacher is only concerned about my grammar and usage!"
I think that I may have become a much better writer, much quicker, had this distinction been made clear to me. I know that this is a major pedagogical shift right now, moving the focus of writing to concise organization of thoughts versus the older focus on grammar (or usage as Williams is so concerned about pointing out.) This is something that I need to stress, not only in my own writing, but it the writing of my students. As Williams argues, editing occurs after a paper does what is supposed to do.

So much for the revising part ... here's the best resource I ever found for editing: Diana Hacker.