Revision

Not revision of poems -- that's a different subject, and deserving of its own post, or series of posts. This is about teaching Freshman Comp students to revise -- a dark and tangled task, but someone's gotta do it. After going over a student's first paragraph recently, making editorial suggestions, then explaining why I made the changes I did, I wrote:

If this seems an improvement over your paragraph (I hope it does), and if my explanation of my rationale is clear, it’s not necessarily because I’m a better writer than you are. It’s because I revise constantly as I write, changing the connectives between thoughts, breaking sentences differently, looking for the right word and changing my first choice if I decide it’s not right, moving thoughts around, making sure that my afterthoughts are moved up so that they don’t sound like afterthoughts. Some time, I should try to save every correction that I make to a critique like this, to show you all how horribly I can write, too, if I leave everything as first draft stuff.

But I couldn't really do that...the process is too fast, too intuitive. Nevertheless, I tried to do it for one sentence:

I started writing this:

Look at all the good things you do later on in

“Good things?” blah….

Look at all the good insights you present later on in the paper – desire to live in a world where he still has the option to pursue, obsession, inner turmoil due to the fact that she might be out of his reach, cannot grasp, fear of commitment, difficult to conceive why she’d marry, life is incomplete, jealousy and greed, incompetent,

“Insights” is better. Then, midway through making a list of the words the writer uses, I realized that the insights gain their force by this forceful language. So I went back:

Look at all the good things you do insights you present powerful and expressive language you use later on in the paper, and the insights you are able to offer with this language:

“Good powerful and expressive language”? That’s awful. “Good” doesn’t belong there – at which point I realized that it didn’t belong with “insights” either, and I should have cut it out in the earlier revision.

Look at all the powerful and expressive language you use later on in the paper, and the insights you are able to offer with this language:

“Language” used twice? I could tighten that:

Look at all the insights you are able to offer with the powerful and expressive language you use later on in the paper:

But for my taste, now I’ve tightened it too much. I’d rather start with language, move to insights, and then finish with language, which is the word that has to go before the colon (changed from a dash), because it’s the word that introduces the list:

Look at all the powerful and expressive language you use later on in the paper, and the insights you are able to offer with this language: Look at all the good insights you present later on in the paper – desire to live in a world where he still has the option to pursue, obsession, inner turmoil due to the fact that she might be out of his reach, cannot grasp, fear of commitment, difficult to conceive why she’d marry, life is incomplete, jealousy and greed, incompetent…

Scratches the surface. But at least it shows a little about the process -- as i do it, anyway. Everyone is different.