WORKSHOP 5 Drafting and Revising

Workshop 5
On Revision

Let's face it, no one enjoys the process of revision. It forces us to be critical of ourselves, often requiring us to discard what took hours to produce.  If the guidelines in Workshop 6 do not inspire you to revise, or don't offer insight into the corrections that your instructor suggested, there are several other approaches to this laborious task.  One possibility is to find an Online Writing Lab (OWL) which has a chat facility.  In these "chat rooms" you can talk to other writers in real-time about your writing crises and perhaps even get some feedback.  Here are some real-time chat rooms for writers:

• The University of Missouri-Columbia's Writery Cafe
• Paradigm real-time Chat forum Online Writing Assistants.
• Salt Lake City Community College Virtual Writing Centers

Alternatively, several OWL's and writing-related sites provide handouts on the topic of revision.  Each emphasizes different aspects of revision at different points within the revisionary process. All of them, however, preserve the pattern of dealing with global problems first (what we called the "bones") and local problems last (what we called the "skin").  The following is a list of other sites with different approaches to the difficulties of revision:

• Revision at the Paradigm Online Writing Assistant (POWA) -- A thorough discussion of revision, broken into the following subcategories: Global and Local Perspectives, Developing Your Style, The Writing Context, The Writer's Voice, Unity of Purpose, Creating Emphasis, Tightening, Designing Effective Sentences, and The Best Word.
• Writing Tips and Techniques offered by the Writers' Workshop at University of Illinois' Writing Center.  Practical considerations for the following topics:
• Audience: Some General Advice
• Body Paragraphs
• Developing a Thesis Statement
• Five Editing Principles
• Parallelism
• Practical Writing Advice
• Transitions and Connective Phrases
• Using Commas Correctly
• Writing Summaries
• Overcoming Writer's Block
• Handling Quotations
• The Elements of Style - William Strunk's classic text on conventional English usage.  Practical lessons of usage rather than suggestions for revision strategies.

Several other strategies for revision, no doubt, can be found on the web and many more in print (go to Google.com, for instance, and do a keyword search with the words composition and revision). They may use different terminology from what you learned in this workshop, but ALL techniques of revision differentiate between revising the ideas of your writing ("bones") and revising the expression of your writing ("muscles" and "skin"). Unfortunately, reading about revision doesn't improve your revision skills as much as actually doing it!  The main activity, therefore, will ask you to perform some online revision.

Main Activity

Perhaps you have already received revisionary feedback from your class members during class time.  But feedback that you perform online is different: you don't have your audience directly in front of you, so you have more time to think about your replies and articulate them in the most constructive manner possible. It's also less stressful for the individuals receiving feedback, since the critical reading doesn't take place in their presence. In short, the online context provides a comfort zone. We'd like for you to submit a piece of your own writing to this workshop's bulletin board, with some comments about the kind of revisionary feedback that you would like.  Then you will provide feedback to another person who has submitted his/her essay to the bulletin board.  In order to carry this out, please read through the following directions carefully:

1. Begin by opening your essay in a word processor, highlight the whole document, and copy it.
2. Then switch over to your browser, find the bulletin for this chapter, and begin a new thread.
3. In the subject line for your message, type in the name of your essay; in the body of the message, paste in your essay's text.
4. At the top of your message, write a brief note to any student who might read your essay.  The note should indicate your purpose in writing this essay, any concerns you have about its present form, and what type of feedback you would like. Here are some suggestions for types of feedback that you might request:
• Ask for a level of revisionary feedback-- bones, muscles or skin (see pp. 152-54 of your textbook).
• Ask your readers which sentences were most interesting and at what point their mind began to wander.
• Ask about places where more could be said or where your points could be clarified.
• Ask for a "movies of the mind" response to each paragraph in your essay.  This exercise is covered within the "muscles" section of the workshop.  Note that if you want this kind of feedback, your introductory note should explain what you were trying to do in each paragraph.  Consult the "Sharing and Responding" section of your book for more details on this technique.
5. When you have finished your introductory note, click the send button.  Now you must find a previously submitted essay, read through it, and provide some feedback.
6. Once you have read an essay that interests you, click the reply button.
7. Notice that the text of the essay is included in your reply.  Make sure that you read the introductory note, so that you know what kind of feedback you should supply.  Before you start writing your feedback, consider the following points:
• Consider what kind of feedback you would like to have for your essay before responding to someone else's. If you find yourself being critical, ask yourself how you would like to receive such feedback for one of your essays.  Be constructive rather than destructive.
• In general, it is better to say how the essay influenced YOU, instead of how the essay was wrong or right.
• Try to be as specific as possible.  Nothing is more useless than a banal statement like "your essay made some good points" or "it was interesting."  Identify precisely what was interesting, bothersome, entertaining, or whatever, and speculate about why it influenced you in this way.
8. Once you have finished, send your feedback to the bulletin board.  Make sure you check the bulletin board over the next few days to see if anyone has responded to your essay.  If someone has, feel free to follow up on his or her points.  You also should check to see whether the author of the essay you responded to has replied to your feedback.