Revising Essays

As we have already noted on our discussions of the writing process, revision, which deals with content and structure, not grammar or vocabulary, can involve three different actions:

• adding (ideas, examples, details, explanation, statistics or whatever is needed)
• cutting
• moving 

And all of these are likely to involve substantial changes to your text.

for example, Apple asked a good question after class today:
If you can't support an idea in your essay, what should you do?

Unfortunately, if you can't support an idea in your essay, you have to cut it. And writers often end up making that sort of decision. Something might sound like a good idea, worth including in your thesis statement, but when you search for the evidence, it might either be lacking or might support something very different to your first idea. And we don't want to state ideas that we cannot support. As a result, you might need to cut an entire paragraph, perhaps replacing it with a new idea that you can support. And that will likely mean you have to revise your thesis statement to reflect the idea that the body of your essay does support.

Of course, not all revisions will be this extreme, you might just want to give some more support for an idea, and once you find that support, one or two new sentences might be enough, although you might decide to make changes elsewhere to more smoothly fit the new support into you paragraph. Sometimes, all that might be needed is rewriting to make an idea clear, but what is unlikely is that changing a single word will be enough.

As well as Apple, a couple of people asked other, equally good questions this morning. By good I mean constructive questions that focus our attention on important issues about the ideas and organization in our writing. Since it would help everyone to share their ideas on such questions, I would suggest that if you have a question about revising your essay for Tuesday evening you write it up here, either as a comment below, or in a new post.