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Revising: Some Thoughts and
Advice
"After I've managed to croak out the
third draft, I'm too tired to edit. It's such a relief to have it done, I just
can't face more work."
"When someone else shows me where it's
bad, I see it. But I never see it on my own."
"It's like murdering one of my own
children."
"What's wrong with it? It looks
perfect to me."
There sit the pages of the yellow foolscap,
all tricked out in words, numbered, the spelling checked. It is late. You're
sick of the French Revolution, or urban blight, or Walt Whitman, or even the
great nudes of the Renaissance. The paper is not your best work; a quick read
has shown you passages which you don't even understand. Probably you should
have started sooner - but it has always been this way: avoidance, then wild
scribbling, then a sickish feeling which you overcome by typing the final
draft as fast as you can, with no proofreading to give you the guilts.
Somewhere in this process, you may have uttered one or all of the quotes
above.
Rewriting won't make deadlines go away. But if
you make it a practiced habit, it will give you more control over your
writing. More control, in turn, will help you use better the time you spend on
first drafts. Even more important is knowing when to rewrite, and how to
manage the rhythms of writing so that you allow rewriting its full strength.
Many of you admit frustration at trying to do too many things at once:
thinking, writing, rethinking, rewriting.
This frustration surfaces in the first
paragraph, where you try out various high-sounding sentences, puffing and
wheezing, and perhaps end up with something like this: "The dimensions of
mental health organizations include adequate personnel parameters and
systematic priority-based objective regulators." Angry, you start again,
and again. It will not come right. And until you get it right, you cannot
write, right?
Bull crackers.
Trying to get it right and draft ideas at the
same time is like trying to pluck a chicken and play champion Frisbee. One
requires patience and a certain cold-bloodedness; the other needs antic
energy. So the first task of rewriting is to set it apart from writing.
Rewriting goes better if you can first identify your characteristic writing
follies.
Do you go off on tangents? Are you overly fond
of semi-colons, proliferating pairs of nouns and verbs, flat-footed adjectives
like "nice," or the words "very" and
"incredible"? Is the passive voice used by you? Do you begin
successive sentences with the same repeated pattern? Do your introductory
paragraphs sound as if they were written by someone whose clothes are too
tight?
If you answer "yes" to these
questions, you need to make rewriting a regular part of your writing schedule.
Developing a sense of audience can help you find where writing goes astray.
Reading Aloud
Reading aloud gives you a sense of your own
voice and helps you hear repetition, wordiness, awkwardness, vague phrases,
and -- if you are a careful listener - just plain nonsense. Even better,
asking someone else to read your words to you helps you hear where you are
vague or unconvincing. Discussing a paper with a friend in a study group can
also help. Listening critically to someone else's prose helps tune your own
ear. Consulting your professors or having a session at the Writing Center may
also sharpen your sense of speaking to others.
Planning
for Rewrites
Hit-List
of Problems in First Drafts
Principles
of Revision
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