Chapter Seven Proofreading and Revision I don t believe any writing is going to be good if it s just done in the first draft.... If we re lucky, and the muses are with us, maybe we don t have to go beyond the third draft. But sometimes it might be twenty drafts before everything is functioning. That s what we re trying to achieve, when we do revisions. Charles Johnson Timothy P. Goss, Tanya C. Klatt, & Alexander V. Ames, Ph.D.
1 Writing, Revisited Writing, if you hadn t noticed yet, is a pretty poor way of communicating. It demands that we place our thoughts in some kind of two-dimensional, logical order, that we leave more things out than we leave in our writing, and that we are careful to place those ideas in a structure that seems familiar to our audience. But we think laterally, in three dimensional patterns, of several things at once. We skip around in our thinking, and though we have very logical things going on inside our head, those thoughts don t often translate well to the page. If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: Read a lot and write a lot. There s no way around these two things that I m aware of, no shortcut. Stephen King. (King, 2010, p. 5) Unfortunately, until someone has figured out how to physically link our minds, writing seems our best alternative. It is therefore incredibly important that we work to be the best writers we can be. There are three key practices that all good writers share: 1. Good writers read as much as possible. Even with all of the things we can teach you, there really is no substitute for what you will gather by reading. Imagine someone trying to be a good mechanic, but never bothering to look at an engine; or a musician who doesn t listen to music. It just doesn t work. If you don t like to read, there s a good chance you re just reading the wrong things. You don t have to read Shakespeare to be a good writer, but you do need to read something. If you ve stopped reading for whatever reason, we ask you to give reading another shot; just take the time to choose material that actually interests you. 2. To be a good writer, you must write and write often. Keep a journal, start a blog, text your friends instead of calling them, try your hand at poetry, whatever you can do to keep writing. Don t expect everything you write to be perfect or even to be read; just write. 3. The third rule, and the focus of this chapter, is to revise often. Revision is one of the most important things a writer can do, yet this is the step that most composition students overlook. In our desperation to be done with the assignment and to move on to other things, we don t always think about the benefits of revision, but developing good revision skills is the one of the key differences between being a writer and being a good writer.
2 Re-vision When you go over your work, become a Samurai, a great warrior with the courage to cut out anything Natalie Goldberg. (Goldberg, 2005, p. 175) To put revision into perspective, let s break down the word itself: re-vision. Revising a piece of writing is, in essence, re-seeing it, re-imagining it, changing it in some measurable way. When we write, we wrestle with concepts, we fight with language, we struggle with organization. Writing is a battlefield. Revision can also be a struggle, but instead of creating, we are usually trimming and shaping the work. Think of it this way: it is much easier to sheer a sheep than to create one. Before we go further, we need to talk about the difference between proofreading and revision. They are, after all, very different activities. Proofreading Proofreading, also referred to as editing, is simply reading through a draft to find and correct errors in grammar, punctuation, organization, wording, style, and/or flow. Proofreading is a necessary step in the writing process, but is generally best served toward the end of an essay (that s why we re only now talking about it). When you begin writing, you shouldn t be thinking about grammar or organization, or any of those other things we mentioned; you should be thinking about distilling the thoughts from your head onto the page. Though the revision process comes much later, you can think about it early; knowing you will be revising your work later makes it a lot easier to start working. Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove; you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain. Elie Wiesel. (Wiesel, n.d.).
3 Once you ve collected the information you need, have written as much as you feel you have to say on the subject, you enter the first proofreading, or editing stage. Here, you read your essay aloud focusing on every word, to make sure that the essay doesn t have any left out (that was on purpose) and that it flows easily from one paragraph to the next, not just through transitions, but through the complete transmission of ideas. It s often a very good idea to have someone read your writing; the more people you can get to read your work, the better chance you have to find potential problems. Once you ve done everything you can do with your essay in its current form, put it away for a day (this is why you should start writing early) so you can look at it with fresh eyes and begin the revision process. Many times a writer has been fooled into thinking that something they had just penned was perfect, only to come back later to find glaring problems that they couldn t see before. In terms of the college environment, any instructor will tell you that students who revise typically receive much higher grades than those who skip this step in the process. If a teacher told me to revise, I thought that meant my writing was a brokendown car that needed to go to the repair shop. I felt insulted. I didn't realize the teacher was saying, Make it shine. It's worth it. Now I see revision as a beautiful word of hope. It's a new vision of something. It means you don't have to be perfect the first time. - Naomi Shihab Nye (In Kent, 2006, p. 40). Revision is the single most important step in the writing process; everything else is prep work. As you sit down this week to begin to revise your final essay for this class, keep in mind that your job is to make this essay as perfect as you can make it. This does not mean you have time to put this off; it means you ll have more time to work with it and get it right.
4 References Goldberg, N. (2005). Writing down the bones. Boston: Shambhala Johnson, C. (2002). Revision. English composition: Writing for an audience. (P. Berkow, Ed.). Boston: McGraw Hill Kent, R. (2006). A guide to creating student-staffed writing centers, Grades 6-12. New York: Peter Lang Publishing King, S. (2010). Why writing is important. The St. Martin s guide to writing, (short ninth ed.). (R. B. Axelrod & C. R. Cooper, Eds.). Boston: Bedford St. Martins Wiesel, E. (n.d.). English: Writing center. St. Mary s College of California. Retrieved from http://www.stmarys-ca.edu/english/writing-center Grantham University 2012