Revision Techniques Many students don’t have much experience doing a deep revision of their work. Revision is a critical stage to writing and can be as rich and reflective as drafting. In our 10-week cycle, programs and courses don’t always build in enough time to perform revisions or rewrites; we are lucky if we have a chance to fix typos and punctuation. So why revise? Let’s compare writing a draft to throwing darts in a dark room. You may have a loose idea of what you’re aiming for, but a draft is always only an attempt. No matter how accomplished a writer/dart-thrower you are, practice and time will yield more reliable and polished results—most likely, you won’t nail the words or order of ideas precisely on your first attempt. Now think of revision as turning on the room’s light and evaluating how you did. Did your darts mostly land on the left side of the board? For your next attempt, you might know to aim a little more to the right. With each attempt and evaluation, you gradually build practice and new insight. The beauty of revision is that you can repeat the process as many times as you need to, and eventually, you might hit a bullseye. There are three main strategies at the heart of revision: cut, clarify, and add. You might use multiple strategies at once (i.e. expansion in some areas, cutting down in others). Your revision process might also look like a rewrite of the draft with renewed focus and clearer goals for your writing. It’s difficult to describe how to know which strategies will be beneficial to your draft. Some writers can get a good feel for which strategies will benefit their drafts through reading and some prefer talking through their draft with others. When in doubt, experimentation is key. On the following page, we provide some prompting questions based on the three revision strategies.
50 | The Evergreen State College | Writing Center
