Tutorama: Week Six: Revision Strategies

Don't Try to Do Everything at Once
One way to frustrate yourself into changing nothing is to try to change everything at once. Set a definite goal for your revision session, so you'll know when you're done and you can move on to the next goal. For instance, you may decide that you need to work on transition sentences between paragraphs, the use of source texts within paragraphs, and correcting your citation errors. Don't try to do all of this at once: instead, give yourself a few hours to work on transition sentences, work all the way through the paper once, and then stop. Then come back later that day, or another day, and give a few more hours to improving your use of source texts throughout the paper. Or, you may decide that you want to work paragraph by paragraph on all of these problems—fine, as long as you only do a few paragraphs at a time. Don't sit down the night before a draft is due and expect to solve all of these problems between dinner and bedtime.

Don't Decide Before You Write What Your Conclusion Will Be
Trying to decide the "thing I will prove with my paper" on page 1 of draft 1 is the best way to derail the research process. If you already know the answers to your questions, you don't need to write a research paper, do you? Anyway, an English 301 research paper can't really prove anything—real proof would require months or years of original experimentation or debate, which are not the point here. Strive for clarity and richness of dialogue among your sources and your own position.

Think of Yourself as a Teacher, and Your Paper as a Teaching Text
If your research paper succeeds in the end, you will teach your classmates and instructor something they did not know. This is the case because no one, not even an experienced professor, can know everything about every field of inquiry—or even any field of inquiry. The world is too vast to master in this way.

So, taking your role as educator seriously, look at your draft and at every point ask: What am I trying to teach the reader? Why? What do I want the reader to know at this point? How might I better explain what I am trying to teach?

If You Want to Examine Your Work as a Whole, Use Reverse Outlining
A regular outline proceeds from the bones of an argument to the flesh of the argument in an orderly, predictable way. But most research is full of surprises, requiring you to reevaluate your position at every turn, so the traditional outline may be of limited use to you in English 301.

However, what if you want to see the bones of your argument as they exist inside a paper you've already started to write? If you already have a draft of five pages or more, try the following exercise:

1. Ignore your thesis paragraph for the moment.

2. Read each argument paragraph one at a time. On a separate sheet of paper, write one sentence for each paragraph, summarizing its central claim.

3. Write these sentences one after another down the page.

4. In the end, you will have a list of sentences that details your argument as it actually exists, rather than as you planned it.

At this point, you can do many things. You can check each paragraph to see if each central claim is as clear in the paper as it is in your summary. You can try to trace the gaps in your logic, and begin to build transition sentences between paragraphs to show the reader how you arrived at Point D from Point A. And you can revise your thesis paragraph, remembering that each sentence in the list you made should be reflected in the thesis paragraph as a step in your overall argument.