Jerz > Writing > Academic | Creative
Take your draft apart, hold every part in your hand, and decide how to reassemble it in order to meet your reader’s needs.
Instead of dusting off that beat up sedan and calling it a second draft, transform it into a huge pink monster truck, or a time-traveling DeLorean, or a solar-powered jetpack. That’s revision.
My first semester as a freshman writing instructor, I jotted the word “redundant” several different places in the margins of a student’s paper, and gave her the opportunity to revise. She returned the paper, having faithfully inserted the word “redundant” wherever I had written it. I should have first taught this student about the purpose of revising a paper.
If you are expected to revise your own document, but all you do is a quick edit job, that means you have made specific surface changes to correct obvious mistakes. Editing can be difficult and valuable work, but typically editing involves local rearrangement of what is already on the page. By contrast, revision calls for big-picture, global changes — that is, you actually change what you say, rather than rearrange it.
“Revision” means “the act of seeing again.”
Editing, when done by professionals, is a painstaking and thorough job of helping writers improve their final product. When done as a quick way to add points to an assignment by making corrections your instructor has marked on a draft, it’s a shortcut that prevents you from actually learning how to be a better writer.
What are students doing, then, when they revise a multiple-draft paper? They are not correcting unauthorized deviations from a single “perfect” paper that is in the back of the instructor’s manual; instead, they are building on what they did well in their draft, and taking their learning to the next level.
Examples of surface-level editing:
Examples of thorough, big-picture self-revision:
by Dennis G. Jerz
29 Aug 2000 — first posted
01 Oct 2011 — modest updates
19 Sep 2016 — added new graphic
30 Jan 2023 — pluralized a reference to “his or her”
| See Also |
| Dennis G. Jerz Show, Don’t (Just) Tell When writing a short story, an academic essay, or a technical report, show, don’t just tell your readers what you want them to know. There. I’ve just told you something. Pretty lame, huh? Now, let me show you…Dennis G. Jerz Writing That Demonstrates Thinking Ability If you learn to recognize the kinds of thinking you are expected to demonstrate on a particular assignment, you can focus your efforts more efficiently. Don’t spend hours on a “summary” when your instructor wants a “synthesis”. |
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this is great it clearly shows what we always tend to omit in our papers - we basically edit in most cases just rewriting what our reader had identified as mistakes other than reading through and making the noted changes to our paper. This is very educative