Engl. 168

FT98

For #4 : A Few Notes on Revision

Be sure you have on hand your first versions with readers' comments and the handout "Notations (Save This Sheet)."

The point of revision is not primarily to patch up or remedy a poor piece of writing but to bring a potentially good piece of writing to fuller realization. Nor is revision the equivalent of editing. (Edit after you revise.) Revision gives you the opportunity to take a close and comprehensive look at what you've written, to reassess the thought and writing, and to look for opportunities to develop, extend, fortify, qualify, or refine the argument of the paper.

A few revision-tactics:

• Add before cutting. Adding relevant, substantially new thought is almost invariably worthwhile. Therefore, in revising, do significantly more than you did in the first version. If the original argues for one point of view against another, entertain and resolve a possible objection to your view. If the original draws on limited material for support and illustration or refers broadly and abstractly to its sources, return to those sources and draw on them in more detail. If the original drops suggestive remarks that aren't explained or developed, extend them, knitting them securely into your central theme. (This is not, of course, to discourage deletions in a paper that is cumbersome and wordy or in a paper that has irrelevancies mixed in with its discussion of its central idea.) Except in unusual cases, I'd expect every revision to be at least a page longer than the first version.

• Consider significant reorganization. Think seriously about reordering the parts of your essay for greater effectiveness and scope. (There's a reason why your word processor has Cut and Paste commands.) Many people, when they write first versions, tend to figure out what they really have to say as they go along. In such cases, it's a very good idea to pick up a late-breaking idea from the tail of the paper, feed it into the introduction, and develop it further in a revised version of the body of the paper.

• One key question: "And so?" There is almost always one more question to be asked about any clear assertion; it may be quite specific to the nature of your argument or it may take the generic form "And so?" What follows from your central contention? How does it change our view of the work(s) or issue(s) on which you are writing? What further question does it leave in its wake? Langdon Winner, you might write, would find John Sculley just another sales-motivated apologist for the information revolution, but Sculley offers mechanisms to control information glut. And so? Who is more likely to be right, and why? William Gibson's view of a future world is a grim travesty of some predictions like Elmer-DeWitt's. And so? Why might these outcomes arrive? Sometimes the "And so?" question needs answering early in an essay in order to make that essay whole and logically cogent. Sometimes it needs raising at the end - as a concluding move that points to a further problem raised by what you've already said and shown.

• More detail? In almost every paper I've read this semester, I've felt the need for more supporting, illustrative, or orienting detail, and peer readers have often called attention to this need. This isn't a call for plot-summary without interpretation or argument; it's a way of helping you envision the appetites of a public audience, not necessarily privy to the details of the text or the assignment, which needs to understand the context of your discussion in the work(s) about which you are writing and in your own expressly illustrative thought.

• And then, of course, edit: trim away surplus "machinery" and verbiage; strengthen sentence structure; break up patterns of abrupt or unwieldy sentences; fortify paragraphs and the transitions between them-and correct error. Often, I'll flag several instances of an error or stylistic difficulty, noting that it recurs elsewhere. Editing the whole paper for that problem is up to you.

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