Will you still love me tomorrow? — Revising

Oct 9th, 2008 | By John Roach | Category: Big Picture

It’s the morning after. You stayed up until the wee hours churning out a big writing project, and now it’s time to hand it in. You pull it up in Word and …

What is this gibberish?

Coffee in hand, you sit down and start the most important part of the writing process: revising.

First time’s not the charm

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts. — Anne Lamott

Don’t be discouraged if the first time you set pen to paper, you come out with something only your mother would love. It’s important to get the ideas out first and make them sing later. Show me a writer who turns in his first draft and I’ll show you a writer who isn’t living up to his potential.

Love at second sight

The word “revision” means to see again. To look at your words with the eyes of a reader rather than a writer. Where do they make sense? Where do they fall apart? What points did you forget? Did you accomplish your purpose? Is that even supposed to be English?

Professional writers know how important this process is. They feel so strongly about it that they hire proofreaders and copyeditors like me to make sure that a professional handles at least one round of revisions.

How to revise

The most important part of the revising process is waiting. Close the file, shove the printout in a desk drawer, and do something else. Forget all about it. Come back to it the next day, or even later if you have the time. This forgetting process allows you time to fall out of love with your own work and see it for the ugly mess that it is.

Next, make an outline of your work. Go through it paragraph by paragraph and write the salient points on a separate sheet of paper. When you’re done, look for missing or extra headings. Did you cover everything? Did you take anything for granted? Do you have extra paragraphs that don’t add to your thesis?

Now look at your transitions. Does everything flow in a logical order? Are there any sudden shifts in topics? Will your reader understand why you’re talking about B when you were just talking about A? An awkward transition is a great way to lose your reader entirely. Keep them on a short leash and lead them ever so gently down the garden path.

Now that you’ve got the logistics down, it’s time for my favorite step: Read the whole thing backwards, paragraph by paragraph. This is the point where you focus on how beautiful your prose is. Reading the paragraphs out of order lets you forget about how everything fits and clear your mind of assumptions. Look for pronouns without antecedents, sentences without verbs, and form without function.

Finally, take a long, hard look at your introduction and conclusion. Are they effective? Do they hook the reader and leave them feeling fulfilled? Do they represent the content, or did you just lead off with a joke?

The next final step is to let someone else read over it. Naturally, unless you’re paying the going rate, you’re not going to convince them to go through all the steps outlined above. But even a casual read through will give you valuable feedback.

It still stinks

I didn’t fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong. — Benjamin Franklin

What happens if you’ve gone through all of the steps and decided you can’t salvage the paper? Start over. You’ve already done the hard parts: researching and prewriting. Better, you know at least one approach that you won’t be happy with. I can almost guarantee that your second draft will be 100 percent better than your first. If it’s not, you may need to go back to those steps and hit the books again.