Week Nine: Revising and Reorganizing

There's no doubt about it: revising is hard work. When you finish your first draft, you may feel confident that your argument makes perfect sense, that you've organized the paper in a way that is easy to follow; and that the only work that remains is to tighten up a few sentences and remove whatever passages have raised questions. You may also just feel tired of trying to get the ideas to fit together and feel that there's not much to be gained by going back to what you've written.

One way to get the revision process started is to try to imagine how someone else might read your work. This may seem like paradoxical advice, for how can you read your own work the way someone else would? Can't you only read your own writing as you would? However paradoxical this notion may be, this is exactly what you must learn how to do to revise well, for it is the skill of anticipating your audience's response that allows you to move your writing from being a private act to a public one. In the exercises that follow, we offer you two strategies for revising that involve making your own writing unfamiliar enough so that you can see it as someone else might.

You were probably taught, at one point or another, that you should produce an outline before you write a draft. While preliminary outlines of this kind can help you organize your initial thoughts, they can be restrictive if they prevent you from following your ideas wherever they lead you once you actually get down to the business of writing. Our feeling is that it is a good idea, after you've finished a draft, to produce a post-draft outline, one that provides a map of where your paper started and then where it went once you started writing. Thus, while the preliminary outline provides a map of where you would like your writing to go, the post-draft outline provides a map of where your writing actually went!

Here's how you do it:

1. Number each paragraph in your rough draft.

2. On a separate sheet of paper, beginning with number 1, write only one sentence or phrase that summarizes discussion in the first paragraph.

3. When you have finished with the first paragraph, move on to the second paragraph and write one sentence or phrase that summarizes the discussion next to the number 2.

4. Repeat until you have briefly summarized each paragraph in your paper.

You now have an outline of what you've actually written. Read the sentences and phrases in order. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Can you follow the logic of your paper from beginning to end?

• Are there places where the connection between paragraphs seems hard to follow or hard to state?

• Are there places where you feel more needs to be said? Places where you need to create a bridge between paragraphs or major ideas in your paper?

• Are there paragraphs or passages that seem to repeat what has already been established earlier in the paper?

• Are the assigned readings represented clearly in your argument?

• Was there a paragraph that was particularly difficult to summarize? One that seems to belong in another place in the paper or might need to be divided in two?

With these questions in mind, you can now return to your first draft with your own diagnosis of where your writing needs additional attention. What the post-draft outline lets you see is the way your paper is actually organized and what the steps in your thinking look like beneath all your writing. So, you know that the post-draft outline has worked if it has shown you places where you can improve the transition between paragraphs, eliminate redundancy, reorganize your presentation, and add new material.

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