College students are sometimes known for procrastination and other, shall we say, emerging time management skills, but we urge you to be kind to yourself (and to your instructor) by following a drafting schedule that is not so hectic. Put some distance — a day or so if you can — between yourself and each draft of your paper. The phrase that seemed just right on Wednesday may appear all wrong on Friday. You’ll have a better chance of detecting lumbering sentences and thin paragraphs if you plan ahead and give yourself the time to read your paper from a fresh perspective. Through the process of revision, you can transform a competent paper into an excellent one.
Begin by asking yourself if your approach to the topic requires any rethinking. One strategy is to identify the most interesting point in your essay. (If you can’t find an interesting point, you have some work to do.) One of the most common issues for writers at your stage of development is not believing in your ability to generate a good, original idea. The consequence of this circumstance is usually that the writer begins to say something interesting, then immediately pulls back, like checking your swing in baseball. Readers would rather see you follow through with those ideas or develop them by delving deeper into the text. There is always room for development, and you would do well to create space for that development by deleting the parts of the argument that are not relevant to the thesis. This is often the most difficult aspect of writing, especially if you are overly focused on the number of words or pages specified in the assignment. You are likely to want to hold onto the words you have generated, but if they are not the best words to develop your thesis, they are not as valuable as you imagine them to be. Now that you have a draft in place, though, you have more freedom to concentrate on developing the important ideas and diminishing the parts of your paper that might be weighing it down.
If your thesis fails to capture what you’ve identified as the most interesting point in your paper, you should see an opportunity to revise. It is possible to revise your paper in order to conform to your uninteresting thesis, but it is preferable (and ultimately easier) to change your thesis to accommodate the paper’s most important analysis. The thesis is meant to be malleable. Recall that we emphasized the word eventually when we introduced the idea of the thesis above. Your entire paper will change with each draft, and your thesis is especially susceptible to change.
The following checklist offers questions to ask about your paper as you revise and edit it. Most of these questions will be familiar to you; however, if you need help with any of them, ask your instructor or review the appropriate section in a composition handbook.