The weather is (allegedly) getting warmer, and some of you are in the middle of writing a thesis or dissertation chapter, while others are preparing a conference presentation, an article draft, or a course paper. Some lucky few are even scrambling to make the changes suggested by their committee members before submitting the final draft of the dissertation for review prior to their defense. Regardless of one’s circumstance, revision is an important part of the writing process at any stage, and is a necessary burden to sharpen our skills as scholars and communicators. After all, we know what we are trying to say—for the most part, at least—and we should make sure that others get it, too.
Why do we revise our writing?
All writing, including academic writing, is meant to be read by someone else, and to create a dialogue with an audience. As such, our writing must be clear to any possible reader, including the most immediate readers of our work: our advisor and dissertation committee members. While your committee is a collection of knowledgeable scholars, one or several members may not be a subject expert in your area of focus and, of course, cannot read our minds. This is actually a useful arrangement, as it gives us an opportunity to make sure our work is accessible to a non-specialist reader and helps us to avoid the dreaded Expert Blind Spot.
What constitutes a revision?
Fixing errors or making minor tweaks in your writing is editing. Revision, on the other hand, is the practice of "looking back" at your essay with the mindset of a reader, not an author. Effective revision is often informed by feedback from other readers, who are digesting the information and argument(s) presented to them and often (but not always) lack in-depth knowledge about the subject that the author possesses.
Revision can take many forms. Perhaps a member of your committee noted that you were lacking sufficient evidence to support the claim made in the third section of a dissertation chapter. The extent of a revision based on this feedback can depend on how substantially connected this section is to the rest of the chapter and could be anything from incorporating some more evidence to support the claim, drawing connections to other sections, or even removing that section entirely. The latter scenario is more common than one may suspect and offers an important lesson for the writing process: do not be afraid to sacrifice some of your writing on the altar of academia.
What are some useful strategies for revision?
- Make an honest assessment of the strongest and weakest parts of your piece of writing, and do some targeted revision to fix the weakest parts. These parts could be anything—a sentence or transition, an example or dataset, a paragraph or section, even a source that could be supplanted by an even better source. You should also supplement your assessment with reader feedback. Ask the reader how well they could follow the logic of your writing, to identify places where they felt confused, and to suggest what you could do to better communicate your ideas with your audience. This assessment can be repeated ad infinitum . . . within reason, of course.
- One method I have observed among both undergraduate and graduate students is the Edward Scissorhands approach. With a pair of scissors, cut your paper draft into individual paragraphs (or just print each paragraph on its own sheet of paper) and physically rearrange your draft to optimize organization, idea and argument development, and writing flow. This approach is a good way to help you focus on paragraph-level revision, which will allow you to critique the organization and effectiveness of each paragraph by looking at:
- Topic sentence: Inform the reader what the paragraph is about/where it will go.
- Focus: Make sure the paragraph stays on topic, does not meander into a new topic halfway through (if so, you should probably have a separate paragraph), and is actually relevant to the topic at hand.
- Logical progression: Is the information in the paragraph presented in a logical order, or are elements presented out of sequence?
- Transitions: Do the sentences connect to one another elegantly—that is, are you using appropriate transition words and phrases between sentences, or have you written a simple series of statements without any clear connective tissue?
- Length: Is a paragraph too long, trying to do too much, or making too many points? If so, consider chopping the paragraph up into more digestible chunks that will be more accommodating to the reader. The same advice goes for overly long sentences; sometimes, simpler is better.
- If you want a slightly less labor-intensive process with comparable results, use highlighters (either on paper or on your computer) to identify different elements of your draft, which will help you better visualize the structure of the argument and placement of information. Different colors can be used for different elements (e.g., green for claims, orange for evidence, pink for commentary, etc.).
You can also reverse engineer an outline of your draft to give yourself a better sense of the structure and flow of your argument. This can be done as marginal comments or in a separate document, but you should indicate your thesis statement and the main point of each paragraph. Distilling the contents of your draft in this way will help you see if there are inefficiencies in the structure and flow of your writing, and potentially highlight gaps in logic or superfluous information.
These are just a few strategies, and there are many others that are best suited to people’s skills, attention to detail, and tolerance for tedium. The best approach is the one you feel the most comfortable using and from which you derive the most benefit. And for those dissertation writers out there, remember to not let perfection get in the way of completion, because the best dissertation is a finished one. I wish you all the best of luck in your revisions!
Banner Courtesy Shutterstock
