“It took me forever to figure out that revision is more than just fixing the mistakes. When I revise, I move paragraphs around, change my thesis statement, or write the same idea differently six or seven times just to see which one sounds best. I find new ideas, better ways of saying things, and stuff that just sounds better than what I originally had.”
-Tom, former Writing Center Tutor
In these reflections of revision, Tom describes many of the benefits of revising one’s writing—and suggestions for how to revise. Revision is absolutely crucial to good writing. In some ways, writing is revision.
Rarely do writers says what they want to say in their papers the first time they write down their ideas, so they need to revisit a first attempt to get an idea on paper to see if they can better say what they mean. Revision also helps you focus on making sure your ideas connect to your audience.
Learning to Revise from What Professionals Do…
Research comparing student writers to experienced, professional writers shows that college students often misunderstand revision—confusing it for the stage of writing more accurately called “editing” (Sommers, 1980). As Applebee (1986) found, building on Sommers’s findings, students often fail to use the revision strategies that more experienced writers use.
By understanding more about what Sommers, Applebee, and other researchers have discovered about revision, you can use more of the strategies that good writers use and avoid some of the mistakes inexperienced writers sometimes make:
[column size=”1-2″ last=”0″ style=”0″]Inexperienced Writers
- only focus on things like words and sentences when they revise their writing
- don’t look at the paper as a whole—to see if it is well organized and makes a clear argument
- see word repetition but not idea repetition
Experienced Writers
- use revision to help form an argument
- view revision as a discovery of meaning and not merely fixing words or sentences
- think about their audiencewhen they revise, looking at their own writing from a reader’s perspective, shifting from their role as the writer
Applebee, A. N. (1986). Problems in Process Approaches: Toward a Reconceptualization of Process Instruction. In A. Petrosky & D. Bartholomae (Eds.), The Teaching of Writing: Eighty-Fifth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sommers, N. (1980, December). Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers. College Composition and Communication, 31(4), 378-388.
Revision and Editing Strategies
For concrete advice on revising your writing and a detailed example of how revision can make a piece of writing clearer and more focused, see Revising the Draft from Harvard University’s Writing Center.
After you’ve done the important and hard work of revising your draft, it’s time to edit your work for clarity, word choice, and sentence-level grammar and mechanics.
The Writing Center at Harvard University also has excellent suggestions for how to effectively edit a piece of writing. You can find these resources by clicking on these links:
