diff --git a/docs/topics/spider-middleware.rst b/docs/topics/spider-middleware.rst
index 05ad930a9..fc7cf734a 100644
--- a/docs/topics/spider-middleware.rst
+++ b/docs/topics/spider-middleware.rst
@@ -5,8 +5,8 @@ Spider Middleware
 =================
 
 The spider middleware is a framework of hooks into Scrapy's spider processing
-mechanism where you can plug custom functionality to process the requests that
-are sent to :ref:`topics-spiders` for processing and to process the responses
+mechanism where you can plug custom functionality to process the responses that
+are sent to :ref:`topics-spiders` for processing and to process the requests
 and items that are generated from spiders.
 
 .. _topics-spider-middleware-setting: