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.

Revision Questions for Final or Annual Academic Statements

• What is at the center of your draft? Is this focus the one you want as the introduction to your education? Does that focus reflect on your education accurately? • Are there ideas in your current draft that are rich and deserve more focus and attention? • Are you going for a more professional tone, or a personal one? • Are there ideas or stories that don’t seem clearly connected to the center of your draft? Should they be told in a different way, or do they belong to a completely different document? • Does the draft show repetition? Is it intentional or not? • Do the paragraphs flow logically in the order they are currently in? • Which parts of your current draft feel like summaries, and which parts feel like narratives? Does the balance between the two feel right, or do you want to restructure certain pieces? • Does your Academic Statement integrate well with the Self-Evaluations you’ve selected (if any) to be in your transcript? • Is your sentence structure varied throughout the piece? Do most of your sentences begin with “I did X, I learned X, I improved on X”? • Does the form of your statement complement the information you’re trying to convey? • In what ways does the structure of your current draft serve the ideas you’re discussing? In what ways does it not serve those ideas? • Are you using any undefined jargon that might alienate the audience?

Revision Questions for the Final Academic Statement

• Will a reader who isn’t familiar with Evergreen be able to understand the content?

Know that some Evergreen terminology (program, ILC, etc.) is defined in the beginning of your transcript. • Will this document age well over time? • Are you comfortable with sharing sensitive elements of your identity and/or personal history to a potential employer or graduate school? (See Including Personal Information in Your Academic Statement on page 36.) • Is your draft over the 750 word limit? Where can you cut down, if so?

To see Revision exercises, stop by the Writing Center for our Revision Exercises handout or print your own at evergreen.edu/writingcenter/resources.