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Revising: Some Thoughts and Advice

"After I've managed to croak out the third draft, I'm too tired to edit. It's such a relief to have it done, I just can't face more work."

"When someone else shows me where it's bad, I see it. But I never see it on my own."

"It's like murdering one of my own children."

"What's wrong with it? It looks perfect to me."

There sit the pages of the yellow foolscap, all tricked out in words, numbered, the spelling checked. It is late. You're sick of the French Revolution, or urban blight, or Walt Whitman, or even the great nudes of the Renaissance. The paper is not your best work; a quick read has shown you passages which you don't even understand. Probably you should have started sooner - but it has always been this way: avoidance, then wild scribbling, then a sickish feeling which you overcome by typing the final draft as fast as you can, with no proofreading to give you the guilts. Somewhere in this process, you may have uttered one or all of the quotes above.

Rewriting won't make deadlines go away. But if you make it a practiced habit, it will give you more control over your writing. More control, in turn, will help you use better the time you spend on first drafts. Even more important is knowing when to rewrite, and how to manage the rhythms of writing so that you allow rewriting its full strength. Many of you admit frustration at trying to do too many things at once: thinking, writing, rethinking, rewriting. 

This frustration surfaces in the first paragraph, where you try out various high-sounding sentences, puffing and wheezing, and perhaps end up with something like this: "The dimensions of mental health organizations include adequate personnel parameters and systematic priority-based objective regulators." Angry, you start again, and again. It will not come right. And until you get it right, you cannot write, right?

Bull crackers.

Trying to get it right and draft ideas at the same time is like trying to pluck a chicken and play champion Frisbee. One requires patience and a certain cold-bloodedness; the other needs antic energy. So the first task of rewriting is to set it apart from writing. Rewriting goes better if you can first identify your characteristic writing follies. 

Do you go off on tangents? Are you overly fond of semi-colons, proliferating pairs of nouns and verbs, flat-footed adjectives like "nice," or the words "very" and "incredible"? Is the passive voice used by you? Do you begin successive sentences with the same repeated pattern? Do your introductory paragraphs sound as if they were written by someone whose clothes are too tight?

If you answer "yes" to these questions, you need to make rewriting a regular part of your writing schedule. Developing a sense of audience can help you find where writing goes astray.

Reading Aloud

Reading aloud gives you a sense of your own voice and helps you hear repetition, wordiness, awkwardness, vague phrases, and -- if you are a careful listener - just plain nonsense. Even better, asking someone else to read your words to you helps you hear where you are vague or unconvincing. Discussing a paper with a friend in a study group can also help. Listening critically to someone else's prose helps tune your own ear. Consulting your professors or having a session at the Writing Center may also sharpen your sense of speaking to others.

   Planning for Rewrites
   Hit-List of Problems in First Drafts
   Principles of Revision

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