Taking Another Look

What if you have spent hour upon hour polishing (editing and proofreading) a draft, only to discover the night before it’s due (a bit of an awful epiphany) that the assigned work requires something different from what you have written? The professor asked for a description, and you wrote a narrative; or the assignment called for analysis, and you wrote strong personal opinions about the usefulness of analyzing; or even, in a worst case scenario, you retold a story instead of discussing it in terms of literary devices. Occasions such as these call for revision, a dismantling of the work in order to rebuild it in another form. Taken apart, the word revision has a connotation of seeing again, taking another look.

What should you do? First, read your work again (re-vision) to see if there is part of it that you totally don’t want to give up, a turn of phrase, a choice word, an idea you love. Once you have decided to keep sections, it might be possible to revamp them, change them enough to fit with the assignment and comply with the requirements. By the way, keeping everything you write is a smart thing to do, even drafts that you don’t think you’ll ever use.

Sometimes revision involves moving whole paragraphs or sentences to other sections of your paper to improve the logic or flow of ideas, a technique better known as editing. If you see points that fit logically somewhere else, move them. At other times, however, revision involves a complete rewriting of your paper, especially if your first draft is not going to work, no matter what you add or take away or move.

The good news is that in writing a first draft, you have probably clarified your ideas, thought about the assignment, or considered how to approach the topic. If your first draft seems off, not quite right, review the assignment first, and then double check to see if you can use any parts of what you have written, weaving it into a new form with changes, either drastic or simple. If you have retold a story instead of analyzing it, use elements of the plot to discuss the story.

Keep in mind, too, that spending time proofreading (fixing sentence-level errors) or editing (improving on the points you’ve made) before you are basically satisfied with what you have written overall may not be time well spent. Save the final tweaking of commas and such until you know the paper you’ve written is the one you will turn in to complete your assignment, the final draft that fulfills the requirements and instructions you’ve been given.

See you next time the breeze is cool, the sun is up, and the waves roll into view! ‘Til then, hang ten!