And in the end, there is revising

There is only one “lecture” post this week, but it is the most important one. It’s about revising. Everyone says that they revise, but really, who does? I mean, there you are, deadline looming, and really, who can be bothered? You write “good enough,” right? At least for government and educational work. Well, there are a lot of reasons that people say “writing is revising.”

One good reason for this is that when you write with revising waiting in the wings you write like someone on fire. The hell with the backspace key! You just plow forward. It’s like you have just had three or four Pepsi Maxes in a row (highest caffeine content of any soda out there) and you just can’t stop talking. Writers block? Never met the man! I’m on a roll baby!

So, that’s the first reason: it frees you up to write without worrying too much about the product. You’ve already been thinking a bit about this before you sat down, and even if you hadn’t, let your fingers do the thinking. This is just like brainstorming: the little editor in your head can just sit this one out. All ideas are not good ones, but let’s get them out there on the page and see how they fly. Or don’t. We’ll worry about that later.

So, (and yeah, I just started a second paragraph with “so,” and you know what? I don’t care! I’m a madman!)–So, are there any other advantages to putting revision in the top drawer of your writing tools? Of course.

Good writing doesn’t just happen linearly. I mean, good writing might, but good reading most assuredly does not. (Just a quick side note: see how I feel myself relying heavily on those italics? It’s a natural outgrowth of this kind of stream of consciousness writing.) (Second side note: notice the tendency to go on tangents? It’s something I do in real life too, but all of my inadequacies in real life ought to be edited away on the page–at least in an ideal world.) As I was saying, before I so rudely interrupted myself, good writing isn’t like telling a good story. I mean, in some sense it is: you begin at the beginning, and then you come to the end and stop. But good stories, either spoken or written, tend to start out “in media res”–in the middle of things. That means that the author has some things in mind that may not be revealed chronologically, or even revealed at all.

What this means is that writing happens in layers. And no one really wants to reveal the soft underbelly of their writing. Each layer improves its organization, and irons out the wrinkles that naturally show up when you are first generating something. No one want to show up in wrinkled clothes for something, but effectively that’s what we end up doing when we write on a daily basis. We write emails without checking them for errors. We definitely don’t check IMs or Tweets. It’s almost considered bad manners to correct a tweet or IM in which you’ve included a typo–who would be that vain?

Some of that hints at the oral nature of those media. You are expected to make mistakes in speech. I run with an academic crowd, and many of us manage to talk like we write. We speak in complete sentences; some of us can even insert silent semi-colons into what we say. But anyone who has ever transcribed an interview knows that the way we talk is usually far different from what makes sense on paper. Someone, meandering half-phrases and half-thoughts are automatically rendered into something sensible by the listener. We edit what we are hearing in a way that we cannot edit what we are reading.

Email falls into a questionable in-between area. It’s often a less formal way of writing. I rarely address an email with “Dear Professor X.” Actually, that’s not quite true: in some roles I do that with frequency, but there is definitely a tendency to think of email as something that would show up on a post-it note rather than written with a fountain pen. If I were to send the president an email, it would take a force of will to begin with “Dear Mr. President:” rather than “Hey, Barack,” even though I would have no difficulty choosing the first for written correspondence.

So, emails may be our most “wrinkly” of written works, but at least a quick read-through would make you sound smarter. That will take more time? Maybe it will, but it also encourages you to keep your emails short and to the point. A number of people have taken the five sentences pledge–keeping their emails as brief as possible. (Note: I broke my stream by going and looking for that link. Should have left it for later if I didn’t already have it on hand. In the worst cases, this can lead to a long, distracting browsing session, or start you on the path of “yak shaving” [link to follow].) Shorter, narrower, more concrete. All of these things lead to better writing. And the less you write in the first place, the more time you have to review it, and to make it as powerful, punchy, and exciting as possible.

Anything “above” the level of email should have time for revision written into the plan of creation. And that time for revising should be pretty extensive, making up well more than half your total writing time. That may seem like a lot, but only if you write slowly. Write fast! Revise slowly. Again, leave that backspace alone. Don’t edit until you actually have something on the page.

A number of people consider writing to be more than just reporting what you know, or what you have discovered. Writing is a way of actually finding things out, of learning, of figuring out what you meant in the first place. Many undergrads, in particular, have come to my office and said something along the lines of “I know what I want to say, I’m just not sure I’m saying it right.” I want to yell “liar,” but I usually resist this urge. I used to think that too, when I was an undergrad. It is one of those myths–like “I want to leave some mystery in my writing to make it more complex”–that I am happy to have been mostly cured of. I now believe that if you can’t write something clearly, you simply do not understand it clearly. But by fixing your writing, you can often fix it in your head. “Oooooh… that’s what I was thinking.”

OK, so there is the case for revising, what is the strategy or process? The first thing to keep in mind is that you need not only to build in time for revision, but, like a fine wine, you need to let something air out before you can revise it. You have to come to it as a stranger. Horace recommended you wait nine years before revising something, and frankly, there are things that need that sort of space. Someday, I may go back and revise my dissertation and make it actually make some sense, but it’s going to take longer than nine years before I take that on. For most emails and just about anything else we write, waiting nine years before writing a second draft is just not going to happen. For an email, it’s great if you can let it rest as a draft, then come back to it. For a paper or article, it’s wonderful if you can leave it for at least a day. The idea is that you need to get some distance, need to be able to treat it as something alien to yourself. In many cases, I’ve left a paper that I thought was completely finished, only to find that I have left out articles or verbs, making sentences into complete nonsense. I used to have a student who would come up to me in class, when I taught in Japan, and say “I am Chinese boy.” Each time, I would correct him “I am A Chinese boy.” He found this, for reasons that remain lost to me, the most amusing thing in the world. When I make this kind of errors in my writing, my spouse–who kind of singed on to proof papers for me when we were married–calls this one of my “Chinese boy” moments.

Once you’ve left it aside, you need to look at the revising as a series of “levels.” At the macro level, you need to make sure your thesis still stands up once you’ve written a piece. Let me save you some time: it doesn’t. That thesis you wrote? It’s the old thesis. As you’ve been writing–and keeping your cool thesis in mind–you’ve found something more interesting, precise, surprising, and exciting as a thesis. Problem is, you haven’t fixed that in the thesis statement. Or worse yet, despite your best intentions, you have no thesis statement. This is one of those “macro” things you need to fix.

Next, are your paragraphs cohesive? Do they make sense? What does your piece look like when you outline it?

“Ack!” I hear you say “Outlining? I left that behind in high school.” I’m fine with that. I’m not as anti-outlining as some writers are. When I get to the point that the words run out, or when I’m stumbling on a section of something, I’ll often outline it and move on to a more interesting part of my thoughts, but I fully understand why some people abhor outlining. It gets in the way of creating something that flows.

But outlining after you’ve written something can be very effective. Are you actually hitting things in order. Are there chunks of your argument that are showing up in the wrong order, or the wrong places? This is the time to fix that. Back in the bad old days when you wrote out your papers longhand for the first draft, this meant rewriting those sections. Now, with cut-and-paste, re-organizing a piece of writing is much more easily accomplished. Writing out an outline, with a short phrase describing each paragraph, shouldn’t be overly time consuming. If it is, perhaps your paragraphs are not as clear as they need to be.

Having looked at the overall structure, you now need to bore down to the paragraph level. Take the paragraphs one at a time. (Just as a quick note, I want to remember to talk about reading aloud, so I’ve dropped down and written the sentence marked ### below before continuing here.) Look at each paragraph and make sure there is a topic sentence. Make sure there is a clear claim. Make sure you have evidence backing up that claim. Finally, and this is a hard one to put a handle on, make sure the paragraph isn’t too long or too short. You are not Proust–and paragraphs are getting shorter. Oh, and unless you are writing for a newspaper, two-sentence paragraphs won’t cut it, and one-sentence paragraphs are only useful if you want to *really* emphasize a particular sentence. Reach for a happy medium.

Within each paragraph, determine what the major claims are. Remember, a claim is any statement of fact that isn’t common knowledge. So, when I say that Cincinnati is in Ohio, or that Einsteinium was discovered by Albert Ghiorso, or that the president is a natural citizen of the United States, these are matters of common knowledge. That doesn’t mean that everyone knows them–there’s that old Mark Twain quip about how uncommon common knowledge is–but the existence of Ohio-ignorants, Physics deniers, and birthers doesn’t change the common nature of the knowledge. It is those items that might have significant and creditable detractors that need evidence: either primary or secondary. If it turns out you just don’t have evidence for a point, or that it is weekly supported, this is to be expected. No one writes perfectly supported arguments. But you should make your case as strongly as you know how.

You should also read your paper in the character of the most objectionable, skeptical, rude, and obnoxious reader possible. Try to ask the tough questions of your prose. Look for holes, and when you find them, add the material that will help you to keep your detractors at bay.

Now, having fixed your paragraphs, argument, and structure, it’s time to finally write your lead and introduction. Yes, I know you already wrote it, but it’s crap. You don’t want to throw out work? It’s a natural response. We start with a blank page and after pounding on a keyboard for a few hours, out sprouts an oeuvre, fully formed. Why pick it apart? And more pointedly, why start walking in reverse, undoing what we have wrought?

One of the hardest lessons to learn in writing is how to unwrite. Actually, getting rid of that first draft of the introduction is usually the easiest step. I’ve already suggested to two of you this semester that your work could have been improved by dropping the first one or two paragraphs, and coming quickly to the matter. We use the phrase “beating around the bush,” as a pejorative in English, but the fact is that those who come quickly to the heart of the matter in speech are considered rude. You are supposed to engage in small talk, the niceties that suggest you view the other person as a person, a friend, a colleague, and not merely instrumentally. In writing, just the opposite is the case. You are putting ink on dead trees (or at least on a live LCD screen). There is no space here for small talk–drop it.

Some of the best writing is the kind that doesn’t hide. In the very first sentence it says: here I am, this is what I’m about, read me. It’s like Babe Ruth pointing out to the bleachers. It’s an indication of where you are going and presents confidence that you know where you are going and you are going to take your reader there.

In any case, while you may have had an inkling of what your paper was about as you are writing it, it’s only after you’ve read it, and perhaps outlined the argument as a result, that you really know what it is about. As the first reader of the article, you are the best person to introduce it. Think about your reader: how do you get them instantly excited about what they are about to read? What are the key ideas that will motivate them.

Finally, I haven’t used subheads this time around, but make sure your subheaded sections actually make sense as little papers on their own: do they have a good argument, a thesis statement? Do they demonstrate their point?

Now that you’ve wrapped up the structural pieces, it’s time to go through the hard slog of making every single word count in each sentence. Going sentence by sentence is exceptionally difficult. After all, you’re bored by this stuff. You know what you wrote, you wrote it. It is really easy to find yourself skimming. You have to avoid that. You have to look, again, for every little piece you can jettison. The quality of your writing is not determined by what you write so much as it is determined by what you throw out. Look for every opportunity to maker your sentences shorter and simpler. Make sure your sentences are sentences, and punctuation falls in the right place. Always remember to check your references!

### Finally, read the piece aloud. Yes, you may feel silly doing this the first few times, but nothing is better at catching awkward language or bad grammar than hearing yourself say it. Don’t just read quickly: speak the lines as if you’re being paid to do it in a recording studio, or for an audio book. And as you are speaking, listen carefully to how each sentence and each word sounds. If you have to go back and restart the sentence, there’s a good chance that a reader will have to do the same.

Rinse, repeat. Revision is never done, but the more times you do it, the better the work becomes.

Over a long period of time, you will become a better writer. The practice in revising will show. But make no mistake, the process of revising is the key to becoming a better writer. Over time, you will internalize some of that process. But more importantly, in the short run, your writing product will improve. In a world of text, that short term improvement is probably what makes revision worth it.