Week Three: Revising Your First Draft
After you’ve completed your first draft, you will
be asked to revise your paper. This is common practice in a writing
classroom, but what are you being asked to do when you are asked
to revise your first draft? What does revision mean?
More often than not, at the beginning of a writing
class, when students are asked to revise, they actually devote their
energies to editing their papers. They cut and add a sentence here or
there throughout their papers; they correct typos and other mistakes
that were pointed out in their first drafts; they might even use the
spellcheck function. While all of these activities are important parts
of the writing process, they only produce minor changes to make the
paper clearer and easier to read. This is what editing is for: it serves
to fine tune an otherwise complete and well thought out paper. Few first
drafts are so complete, polished, and well thought out that they are
ready to be moved immediately to the editing stage. Editing, in other
words, comes after the revision process, not before it or instead
of it.
To formulate a solid final draft, you need to work
with your first draft in a different way. This is the work of revision:
rather than tinkering with your initial writing, you need to literally
“re-see” your paper, to look at your ideas from a fresh perspective.
Revisionary writing involves asking yourself difficult questions that
challenge, complicate, and extend the position you began to develop
in your first draft. It also requires re-reading the assigned essays
to focus on passages you didn’t understand or didn’t consider
in your first draft. And, finally, it means thinking about the implications
and possible consequences of the position you’ve developed: it
means asking yourself, “If what I’ve argued is true, what
follows? What does it matter?”
Revising is a lot more work than editing; it is also
a different kind of work. Revision is the place where you make your
education your own: it is the place where you demonstrate that you take
your own thoughts seriously enough to think them all the way through.
So, when you revise, you will often find yourself writing an entirely
new draft that reflects how your thinking has changed as a result of
your increased understanding of the assigned readings, your participation
in class discussion, and your exposure to the ideas and comments of
your teacher and your peers. If you pay attention to all these different
kinds of feedback, you won’t have any trouble seeing where the
thoughts in your first draft can be improved and further developed.
And this is what revision is for: it’s to help you think better,
fuller, more carefully articulated thoughts.
So, here’s a quick way to tell whether you are
revising or editing your paper when you are working on it. Ask yourself
the following question: “Am I learning anything new by working
on this paper in this way?” If the answer is yes, then you are
revising; if the answer is no, then you are either editing your work
to better express you original thoughts or you’re looking out the
window thinking about something else altogether!
MYTH: “The only important feedback is my
instructor’s comments on my rough draft, so all I have to do is
change what she makes comments on.”
REALITY: You should base your revision on a
number of different forms of feedback. On the class days after you turn
in your rough draft, instructors will often give general feedback to
the entire class, highlighting the areas and activities that require
further attention, such as creating a position or using quotations to
support ideas. Your job during such discussions is to think about how
your teacher’s general comments apply to your particular paper:
your job, in other words, is to think connectively about the relationship
between what your teacher is saying and what you’ve written. When
you begin to think and write in this way, you won’t just focus
on those passages your teacher has commented on; you’ll begin applying
your teacher’s comments and their implications to the rest of your
paper, thereby seeing and creating changes that you, yourself, have
initiated.
In-class activities such as close reading textual
passages, making connections between essays, and developing position
statements all model the kinds of techniques you should use when you
are revising your first draft. Instructors will also often provide written
handouts that provide suggestions for revision. Use all of these resources
to guide your writing of your final draft.
MYTH: “My
classmates are as inexperienced at writing essays as I am. I can’t learn anything from them and there’s no point
in following their suggestions. That’s just the blind leading the
blind.”
REALITY: One
of the greatest challenges students face when writing essays in school
is figuring out who the audience is for their work. Obviously, the teacher
is the one clear and unambiguous audience member who will read and evaluate
the work, but the teacher is not the only audience member essays are
written for. While many of your peers are learning college-level writing
techniques for the first time along with you, you should consider all
of your classmates as part of the audience for your work.
If an audience of your peers can’t follow your
argument, that’s a problem that you need to take care of. As readers,
your peers can tell you if you are communicating your ideas clearly.
Your peers can also let you know whether what you have written seems
to be an obvious or original response. So, pay close attention to the
comments your peers provide in peer review activities, and especially
to the questions they ask. You don’t have to agree with what your
peers have said, but you should learn how to use what they’ve said
to help you find gaps in the presentation of your ideas.
Working hard at being a good reviewer of your peers’
papers has benefits for your own work as well. Peer review gives you
the opportunity to see how your writing compares to the writing of your
peers. It also provides you with an arena for practicing assessing the
work of others. Once you can distinguish between passing and failing
work, you are on your way to becoming your own teacher. So, think of
peer review as a way to train your “teacherly” skills—reading
with understanding, providing helpful feedback, and coming up with accurate
grades.
When you revise your paper, you can rewrite it on
two levels: you can revise your central position and you can revise
the individual paragraphs that make up your paper. Revising your central
position inevitably involves revising the paragraphs in your paper,
too, so it is bound to seem like much more work than just working on
individual paragraphs, but more often than note substantial revision
will require that you work on both levels simultaneously.
Here’s a list of activities that will help you
revise your paper on both of these levels.
Re-read your draft carefully. Then on a separate sheet of paper, answer the following questions:
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What is the purpose of your essay? What issues or set of concerns
do you address and how do you address them?
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What are the central concepts from the essays that you explore?
What relationship between those concepts do you explain?
-
Do you explain how and why the writers’ ideas relate to your
own?
-
Have you looked at the issue from more than one perspective? Have
you considered how individuals with a different or opposite set
of interests might approach the issue? How would they respond to
your position? How would you provide an answer to their insights
or objections? How would you change your position because
of these questions?
-
Are there issues that were brought up in class discussion, in your
teacher’s comments, or in your rereading of the assigned essays
that are not fully addressed in your own essay?
Now go back and reread your essay again. Underline
the sections of your draft that correspond to the answers to the questions
above and write the matching number in the margin.
(Please see, Week
One: Creative Reading, for more instruction on rereading during
the revision process.)
Do you say anything in your answers that you don’t
say in your paper? If so, revise
or add sentences to cover those ideas.
If you can’t find a part of your paper that corresponds
with an answer, identify a place where that answer could contribute
to your argument and work on integrating it into your essay.
The suggestions for revising paragraphs should help you in this
effort.
Introductory paragraph(s)
-
Do you pose the question that your essay will seek to answer or
to better understand?
-
Do you introduce the concepts that are central to your position?
-
Do you explain the focus for your essay and why it is important?
Body paragraphs
-
Do you have a clear focus for each paragraph?
-
Do you explain why you include each point in your essay?
-
Do you justify why you include each quotation (i.e. do you explain
how the quote relates to your position?)
-
Do you put your sources in conversation with each other? In other
words, do you explain how one writer might react to the idea of
another author? Do you explain how that reaction supports or challenges
your own position?
-
Do you include transitional sentences at the beginning or the end
of key paragraphs? Do these sentences establish clear connections
between the ideas in your paper?
Conclusion paragraph(s)
-
Do you explain why your idea or position is significant to the
ongoing discussion of this topic? That is, have you explored the
“action horizon” of your ideas? Have you found a way to
answer the “so what?” question?
The first step in producing strong final drafts is
to understand the difference between editing and revising. Editing is
the process of tightening up a near finished paper; revision is the
process of testing out, extending, and re-thinking the ideas in your
initial draft. The most common mistake beginning writers make is to
edit their first drafts when what is called for is revision.
To get the revision process started, we recommend that
you take a day off from writing after you complete your first draft.
Take this time to reread the assigned essays, focusing on passages you
had difficulty with and on seeking out further connections to the ideas
you’ve raised in your paper. Then work on your revision over the
course of several days: this way you can come back to your paper with
“fresh eyes” several times, improving it each time you work
on it. By reconsidering your
ideas from multiple perspectives over the course of several days, you
will strengthen your argument and address the concerns of a wider and
more diverse audience.
