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I use to be the most lazy pre-writer you have ever seen. This lead to a great deal of revision later on. Not just revision...major substantial revision. Not grammar, or punctuation but serious nuts and bolts of composition. I've learned though, (the hard way) that I was just hurting myself. I fought this advise from teachers as one step that a good writer might very well skip.......boy was I wrong. Revision might be directly related to pre-writing. I usually go about the revision process in the following ways. First I make sure to read the paper out loud and slow. something takes place when your own words are physically spoken into your own ears. This is where I usually pick up my need for commas and the like. I get a feel for the "cadence" of my prose and really ""feel the tone I've tried to impart to the piece. The next step is to enlist peer review. I used to fight this concept as well only to my own demise. You would be surprised by what gets missed when you focus so closely on your own work. The phrase "Can't see the forest for the trees." comes to mind. Just getting a fresh set of eyes on your work takes revision to a very productive level. But this can only be achieved if one can get passed the adversity to criticism. The peer you choose is not criticizing your work as an attack or with malicious intent. Quite the contrary, they are helping to improve your work and prove to be very beneficial. The re-working of our current paper has been very easy as I really focused on pre-writing on this one. Boy! what a difference. If I had known how beneficial this was to the process I would have started this much earlier. Now the only revisions I have are grammatical or involve punctuation and the like. I'm pretty happy with the composition as a whole and will keep the format very close to the outline I started with. Good Luck with your papers.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Daniel
If you would like to learn more tips on revision follow the following link:
http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/revising-drafts/
You have such a great point about reading out loud! Often we can hear some of the mistakes just by reading them as long as we read carefully and read what we actually wrote down. Thank goodness for peer reviewers who can catch those other mistakes our brains skip over! I think it's great that you're applying new writing techniques that are helping you and easing the revision process! Good luck with you paper!
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