Week 7 assignment

Now that you have updated your essay draft using the reverse outlining process, the final step is to engage in a more thorough process of revision*. When you revise your paper, you consider ways in which the organization, content, and grammar of your essay could be improved. During the revision phase, you will likely read and reread portions of your essay time and time again. Furthermore, you will likely overhaul entire sections of your paper, returning to the draft phase and then moving on to revise once again.

General Tips for Revision

pencil

Before you begin revising your essay, it is helpful to consider the following general tips for revision. These tips can apply to any writing assignment. You will get plenty of practice in making large-scale and small-scale changes to strengthen your writing and clarify your ideas, but this page should help you to create the conditions for embarking on the kind of self-assessment that is part of the revision process.

Get some distance from your paper. Set your draft aside for a while, preferably overnight or longer. When you read it again, try to assume your audience's perspective and read your work with fresh eyes.

In order to get the distance you need, you will have to give yourself plenty of time to revise. Don't wait until the night before a paper is due to attempt revisions. Instead, try to finish writing your draft at least a few days before the deadline so you have time to re-read and to make the large-scale and small-scale changes that are necessary.

Print out a hard copy of your draft. It is often difficult to catch grammar and spelling errors when you read your paper on a computer screen, and it is just as hard to get a good sense of the whole of your paper to see where and how your draft needs re-organizing. Revising a hard copy allows you to spot these problems and to make notations directly on your draft as you read it.

Read your paper out loud. It is often easier to hear the parts of your draft that need clarification or correction than it is to see them. Reading your paper aloud with a pen or pencil in hand will help you locate the sentence-level changes that need to be made and the places where your writing is confusing or unclear.

Work through each of the tabs below to learn how to commit different stages of revisions.

Select a list item tab, press enter, then search down for text. When you hear End of tab content, go back to the next list item to access the next list item tab.

Large-scale revisionsSmall-scale revisionsSelf-evaluationPeer critique

Large-scale revisions

After you're sure that your argument is addressing the right content to meet your purpose, it's time to undertake large-scale revisions—those revisions that concern the organization of your ideas and filling in evidence and details to support your points.

Some sections and paragraphs may require rewriting at this stage, but you don't need to look for proofreading errors yet. Since you'll be adding, removing, moving, and changing sentences to better emphasize your overall meaning, you don't need to get bogged down into the details of sentence structure or punctuation quite yet.

When you return to your draft, begin by assessing the paper as a whole.

Is your thesis statement* clearly stated?

Do your major points support your thesis statement?

Are the types of points you need to address to satisfy assignment requirements present?

Have you summarized opposing viewpoints when appropriate?

Have you summarized potential objections, if necessary?

Open up your essay draft in a word processing program and highlight the parts of the essay that respond to these requirements. You may even use your word processor's commenting feature to add a comment to state the role of the section in your essay.

If you can't identify a section that serves one of these functions, you should create one and support that section with more details and evidence.

End of tab content.

Video Commentary: Revision Strategies

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