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How to Revise Drafts
After writing the first draft of an essay, you may think much of your work is done, but actually the real work – revising – is just beginning. The good news is that by this point in the writing process you have gained some perspective and can ask yourself some questions: Did I develop my subject matter appropriately? Did my thesis change or evolve during writing? Did I communicate my ideas effectively and clearly? Would I like to revise, but feel uncertain about how to do it?
How to Revise
First, put your draft aside for a little while. Time away from your essay will allow for more objective self-evaluation. When you do return to the draft, be honest with yourself; ask yourself what you really think about the paper.
Check the focus of the paper. Is it appropriate to the assignment prompt? Is the topic too big or too narrow? Do you stay on track throughout the entire paper? (At this stage, you should be concerned with the large, content-related issues in the paper, not the grammar and sentence structure).
Get feedback . Since you already know what you’re trying to say, you aren’t always the best judge of where your draft is clear or unclear. Let another reader tell you. Then discuss aloud what you were trying to achieve. In articulating for someone else what you meant to argue, you will clarify ideas for yourself.
Think honestly about your thesis. Do you still agree with it? Should it be modified in light of something you discovered as you wrote the paper? Does it make a sophisticated, provocative point? Or does it just say what anyone could say if given the same topic? Does your thesis generalize instead of taking a specific position? Should it be changed completely?
Examine the balance within your paper. Are some parts out of proportion with others? Do you spend too much time on one trivial point and neglect a more important point? Do you give lots of details early on and then let your points get thinner by the end? Based on what you did in the previous step, restructure your argument: reorder your points and cut anything that’s irrelevant or redundant. You may want to return to your sources for additional supporting evidence.
Now that you know what you’re really arguing, work on your introduction and conclusion . Make sure to begin your paragraphs with topic sentences, linking the idea(s) in each paragraph to those proposed in the thesis.
Proofread. Aim for precision and economy in language. Read aloud so you can hear imperfections. (Your ear may pick up what your eye has missed). Note that this step comes LAST. There’s no point in making a sentence grammatically perfect if it’s going to be changed or deleted anyway.
As you revise your own work, keep the following in mind:
Revision means rethinking your thesis. It is unreasonable to expect to come up with the best thesis possible – one that accounts for all aspects of your topic – before beginning a draft, or even during a first draft. The best theses evolve; they are actually produced during the writing process. Successful revision involves bringing your thesis into focus—or changing it altogether.
Revision means making structural changes. Drafting is usually a process of discovering an idea or argument. Your argument will not become clearer if you only tinker with individual sentences. Successful revision involves bringing the strongest ideas to the front of the essay, reordering the main points, and cutting irrelevant sections. It also involves making the argument’s structure visible by strengthening topic sentences and transitions.
Revision takes time. Avoid shortcuts: the reward for sustained effort is an essay that is clearer, more persuasive, and more sophisticated.
Think about your purpose in writing: Does your introduction clearly state what you intend to do? Will your aims be clear to your readers?
Check the organization. Does your paper follow a pattern that makes sense? Doe the transitions move your readers smoothly from one point to the next? Do the topic sentences of each paragraph appropriately introduce what that paragraph is about? Would your paper be work better if you moved some things around?
Check your information. Are all your facts accurate? Are any of our statements misleading? Have you provided enough detail to satisfy readers’ curiosity? Have you cited all your information appropriately?
Revision doesn’t necessarily mean rewriting the whole paper. Sometimes it means revising the thesis to match what you’ve discovered while writing. Sometimes it means coming up with stronger arguments to defend your position, or coming up with more vivid examples to illustrate your points. Sometimes it means shifting the order of your paper to help the reader follow your argument, or to change the emphasis of your points. Sometimes it means adding or deleting material for balance or emphasis. And then, sadly, sometimes revision does mean trashing your first draft and starting from scratch. Better that than having the teacher trash your final paper.
Revising Sentences
Read your paper out loud, sentence by sentence, and look for places where you stumble or get lost in the middle of a sentence. These are obvious places that need fixing. Look for places where you get distracted or even bored – where you cannot concentrate. These are places where you probably lost focus or concentration in your writing. Cut through the extra words or vagueness or digression: get back to the energy.
Tips for writing good sentences:
Use forceful verbs – replace long verb phrases with a more specific verb. For example, replace “She argues for the importance of the idea” with ‘she defends the idea.” Also, try to stay in the active voice.
Look for places where you’ve used the same word or phrase twice or more in consecutive sentences and look for alternative ways to say the same thing OR for ways to combine the two sentences.
Cut as many prepositional phrases as you can without losing your meaning. For instance, the sentence “There are several examples of the issue of integrity in Huck Finn ” would be much better this way: “ Huck Finn repeated addresses the issue of integrity.”
Check your sentence variety. IF more than two sentences in a row start the same way (with a subject followed by a verb, for example), then try using a different sentence pattern. Also, try to mix simple sentences with compound and compound-complex sentences for variety.
Aim for precision in word choice. Don’t settle for the best word you can think of at the moment—use a thesaurus (along with a dictionary) to search for the word that says exactly what you want to say.
Look for sentences that start with “it is” or “there are” and see if you can revise them to be more active and engaging.
By Jocelyn Rolling, English Instructor Last edited October 2016 by Allison Haas, M.A.
Revising Drafts
Rewriting is the essence of writing well—where the game is won or lost. —William Zinsser
What this handout is about
This handout will motivate you to revise your drafts and give you strategies to revise effectively.
What does it mean to revise?
Revision literally means to “see again,” to look at something from a fresh, critical perspective. It is an ongoing process of rethinking the paper: reconsidering your arguments, reviewing your evidence, refining your purpose, reorganizing your presentation, reviving stale prose.
But I thought revision was just fixing the commas and spelling
Nope. That’s called proofreading. It’s an important step before turning your paper in, but if your ideas are predictable, your thesis is weak, and your organization is a mess, then proofreading will just be putting a band-aid on a bullet wound. When you finish revising, that’s the time to proofread. For more information on the subject, see our handout on proofreading .
How about if I just reword things: look for better words, avoid repetition, etc.? Is that revision?
Well, that’s a part of revision called editing. It’s another important final step in polishing your work. But if you haven’t thought through your ideas, then rephrasing them won’t make any difference.
Why is revision important?
Writing is a process of discovery, and you don’t always produce your best stuff when you first get started. So revision is a chance for you to look critically at what you have written to see:
- if it’s really worth saying,
- if it says what you wanted to say, and
- if a reader will understand what you’re saying.
The process
What steps should i use when i begin to revise.
Here are several things to do. But don’t try them all at one time. Instead, focus on two or three main areas during each revision session:
- Wait awhile after you’ve finished a draft before looking at it again. The Roman poet Horace thought one should wait nine years, but that’s a bit much. A day—a few hours even—will work. When you do return to the draft, be honest with yourself, and don’t be lazy. Ask yourself what you really think about the paper.
- As The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers puts it, “THINK BIG, don’t tinker” (61). At this stage, you should be concerned with the large issues in the paper, not the commas.
- Check the focus of the paper: Is it appropriate to the assignment? Is the topic too big or too narrow? Do you stay on track through the entire paper?
- Think honestly about your thesis: Do you still agree with it? Should it be modified in light of something you discovered as you wrote the paper? Does it make a sophisticated, provocative point, or does it just say what anyone could say if given the same topic? Does your thesis generalize instead of taking a specific position? Should it be changed altogether? For more information visit our handout on thesis statements .
- Think about your purpose in writing: Does your introduction state clearly what you intend to do? Will your aims be clear to your readers?
What are some other steps I should consider in later stages of the revision process?
- Examine the balance within your paper: Are some parts out of proportion with others? Do you spend too much time on one trivial point and neglect a more important point? Do you give lots of detail early on and then let your points get thinner by the end?
- Check that you have kept your promises to your readers: Does your paper follow through on what the thesis promises? Do you support all the claims in your thesis? Are the tone and formality of the language appropriate for your audience?
- Check the organization: Does your paper follow a pattern that makes sense? Do the transitions move your readers smoothly from one point to the next? Do the topic sentences of each paragraph appropriately introduce what that paragraph is about? Would your paper work better if you moved some things around? For more information visit our handout on reorganizing drafts.
- Check your information: Are all your facts accurate? Are any of your statements misleading? Have you provided enough detail to satisfy readers’ curiosity? Have you cited all your information appropriately?
- Check your conclusion: Does the last paragraph tie the paper together smoothly and end on a stimulating note, or does the paper just die a slow, redundant, lame, or abrupt death?
Whoa! I thought I could just revise in a few minutes
Sorry. You may want to start working on your next paper early so that you have plenty of time for revising. That way you can give yourself some time to come back to look at what you’ve written with a fresh pair of eyes. It’s amazing how something that sounded brilliant the moment you wrote it can prove to be less-than-brilliant when you give it a chance to incubate.
But I don’t want to rewrite my whole paper!
Revision doesn’t necessarily mean rewriting the whole paper. Sometimes it means revising the thesis to match what you’ve discovered while writing. Sometimes it means coming up with stronger arguments to defend your position, or coming up with more vivid examples to illustrate your points. Sometimes it means shifting the order of your paper to help the reader follow your argument, or to change the emphasis of your points. Sometimes it means adding or deleting material for balance or emphasis. And then, sadly, sometimes revision does mean trashing your first draft and starting from scratch. Better that than having the teacher trash your final paper.
But I work so hard on what I write that I can’t afford to throw any of it away
If you want to be a polished writer, then you will eventually find out that you can’t afford NOT to throw stuff away. As writers, we often produce lots of material that needs to be tossed. The idea or metaphor or paragraph that I think is most wonderful and brilliant is often the very thing that confuses my reader or ruins the tone of my piece or interrupts the flow of my argument.Writers must be willing to sacrifice their favorite bits of writing for the good of the piece as a whole. In order to trim things down, though, you first have to have plenty of material on the page. One trick is not to hinder yourself while you are composing the first draft because the more you produce, the more you will have to work with when cutting time comes.
But sometimes I revise as I go
That’s OK. Since writing is a circular process, you don’t do everything in some specific order. Sometimes you write something and then tinker with it before moving on. But be warned: there are two potential problems with revising as you go. One is that if you revise only as you go along, you never get to think of the big picture. The key is still to give yourself enough time to look at the essay as a whole once you’ve finished. Another danger to revising as you go is that you may short-circuit your creativity. If you spend too much time tinkering with what is on the page, you may lose some of what hasn’t yet made it to the page. Here’s a tip: Don’t proofread as you go. You may waste time correcting the commas in a sentence that may end up being cut anyway.
How do I go about the process of revising? Any tips?
- Work from a printed copy; it’s easier on the eyes. Also, problems that seem invisible on the screen somehow tend to show up better on paper.
- Another tip is to read the paper out loud. That’s one way to see how well things flow.
- Remember all those questions listed above? Don’t try to tackle all of them in one draft. Pick a few “agendas” for each draft so that you won’t go mad trying to see, all at once, if you’ve done everything.
- Ask lots of questions and don’t flinch from answering them truthfully. For example, ask if there are opposing viewpoints that you haven’t considered yet.
Whenever I revise, I just make things worse. I do my best work without revising
That’s a common misconception that sometimes arises from fear, sometimes from laziness. The truth is, though, that except for those rare moments of inspiration or genius when the perfect ideas expressed in the perfect words in the perfect order flow gracefully and effortlessly from the mind, all experienced writers revise their work. I wrote six drafts of this handout. Hemingway rewrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times. If you’re still not convinced, re-read some of your old papers. How do they sound now? What would you revise if you had a chance?
What can get in the way of good revision strategies?
Don’t fall in love with what you have written. If you do, you will be hesitant to change it even if you know it’s not great. Start out with a working thesis, and don’t act like you’re married to it. Instead, act like you’re dating it, seeing if you’re compatible, finding out what it’s like from day to day. If a better thesis comes along, let go of the old one. Also, don’t think of revision as just rewording. It is a chance to look at the entire paper, not just isolated words and sentences.
What happens if I find that I no longer agree with my own point?
If you take revision seriously, sometimes the process will lead you to questions you cannot answer, objections or exceptions to your thesis, cases that don’t fit, loose ends or contradictions that just won’t go away. If this happens (and it will if you think long enough), then you have several choices. You could choose to ignore the loose ends and hope your reader doesn’t notice them, but that’s risky. You could change your thesis completely to fit your new understanding of the issue, or you could adjust your thesis slightly to accommodate the new ideas. Or you could simply acknowledge the contradictions and show why your main point still holds up in spite of them. Most readers know there are no easy answers, so they may be annoyed if you give them a thesis and try to claim that it is always true with no exceptions no matter what.
How do I get really good at revising?
The same way you get really good at golf, piano, or a video game—do it often. Take revision seriously, be disciplined, and set high standards for yourself. Here are three more tips:
- The more you produce, the more you can cut.
- The more you can imagine yourself as a reader looking at this for the first time, the easier it will be to spot potential problems.
- The more you demand of yourself in terms of clarity and elegance, the more clear and elegant your writing will be.
How do I revise at the sentence level?
Read your paper out loud, sentence by sentence, and follow Peter Elbow’s advice: “Look for places where you stumble or get lost in the middle of a sentence. These are obvious awkwardness’s that need fixing. Look for places where you get distracted or even bored—where you cannot concentrate. These are places where you probably lost focus or concentration in your writing. Cut through the extra words or vagueness or digression; get back to the energy. Listen even for the tiniest jerk or stumble in your reading, the tiniest lessening of your energy or focus or concentration as you say the words . . . A sentence should be alive” (Writing with Power 135).
Practical advice for ensuring that your sentences are alive:
- Use forceful verbs—replace long verb phrases with a more specific verb. For example, replace “She argues for the importance of the idea” with “She defends the idea.”
- Look for places where you’ve used the same word or phrase twice or more in consecutive sentences and look for alternative ways to say the same thing OR for ways to combine the two sentences.
- Cut as many prepositional phrases as you can without losing your meaning. For instance, the following sentence, “There are several examples of the issue of integrity in Huck Finn,” would be much better this way, “Huck Finn repeatedly addresses the issue of integrity.”
- Check your sentence variety. If more than two sentences in a row start the same way (with a subject followed by a verb, for example), then try using a different sentence pattern.
- Aim for precision in word choice. Don’t settle for the best word you can think of at the moment—use a thesaurus (along with a dictionary) to search for the word that says exactly what you want to say.
- Look for sentences that start with “It is” or “There are” and see if you can revise them to be more active and engaging.
- For more information, please visit our handouts on word choice and style .
How can technology help?
Need some help revising? Take advantage of the revision and versioning features available in modern word processors.
Track your changes. Most word processors and writing tools include a feature that allows you to keep your changes visible until you’re ready to accept them. Using “Track Changes” mode in Word or “Suggesting” mode in Google Docs, for example, allows you to make changes without committing to them.
Compare drafts. Tools that allow you to compare multiple drafts give you the chance to visually track changes over time. Try “File History” or “Compare Documents” modes in Google Doc, Word, and Scrivener to retrieve old drafts, identify changes you’ve made over time, or help you keep a bigger picture in mind as you revise.
Works consulted
We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.
Anson, Chris M., and Robert A. Schwegler. 2010. The Longman Handbook for Writers and Readers , 6th ed. New York: Longman.
Elbow, Peter. 1998. Writing With Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process . New York: Oxford University Press.
Lanham, Richard A. 2006. Revising Prose , 5th ed. New York: Pearson Longman.
Lunsford, Andrea A. 2015. The St. Martin’s Handbook , 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s.
Ruszkiewicz, John J., Christy Friend, Daniel Seward, and Maxine Hairston. 2010. The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers , 9th ed. Boston: Pearson Education.
Zinsser, William. 2001. On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction , 6th ed. New York: Quill.
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How to Write a Graduate-Level Essay
- 2. Create a preliminary document plan
- 3. Draft your thesis statement
- 4a. Become familiar with the information landscape
- 4b. Select the appropriate search tool
- 4c. Develop effective searches
- 4d. Beyond keyword searching
- 4e. Find statistical information
- 4f. Evaluate the resources you find
- 4g. Read, absorb, and organize the information you find
- 5. Finalize your document plan
- 6. Double-check your research
- 7. Start writing the first draft
- 8. Overcoming writer's block
Revise the draft
- 10. Edit the draft
- 11. Prepare the final version
- 12. Submit the assignment
- Does your work achieve the outcomes of the assignment? Review the assignment description to ensure you’ve addressed all the requirements. If you're concerned about the content matter, please check with your instructor to clarify your understanding. It's unlikely that you'll be able to send your draft to the instructor for his/her review; however, you should feel comfortable approaching the instructor with any questions regarding the content of the paper. If you are writing your thesis, major research paper, or capstone project, your academic supervisor will be able to give you a second opinion on your work.
- Major revisions, such as needing to add, delete, move, or rework large chunks of text, are usually a result of an unclear line of argument throughout the text. Make sure that you have a detailed plan for your document (see Planning the Paper ), and then follow that plan while writing. If you didn’t use a plan while writing, try using a planning template (e.g., Finalize Your Document Plan ) when you’re evaluating your draft to assess what you’ve already written and identify what’s missing. For example, by comparing your draft to a template, you could discover that your work is missing a thesis statement , or realize that while you have topic sentences and supporting evidence in each body paragraph, the paragraphs are missing the analysis that explains why the evidence is important (see Writing an Academic Paragraph and Body Paragraph Checklist for more information).
- To check if paragraphs are in a logical order, write your thesis statement at the top of a page, and then list the topic sentence of every paragraph that follows. Does the list reflect your plan for the document? Have you added or left out paragraphs that could affect the discussion, either by providing a distraction or by omitting information? Does the direction of the discussion make sense? Is there a logical progression from the introduction, through the body paragraphs, and into the conclusion? Will your audience understand the order of the paragraphs?
- Does your work rely heavily on direct quotations? If so, to improve the flow of the text and demonstrate your understanding of the material, could you instead paraphrase some of the material? For tips on paraphrasing, please see Summarizing and Paraphrasing .
- If possible, ask someone who isn’t familiar with your topic or assignment to read your work and indicate where they struggled to understand the meaning of the text. You’re not looking for that person to edit your work; rather, you need to know if your text is easy to read and makes sense.
- For more questions to assist with revising, please see the “Thesis”, “Purpose”, “Audience”, “Organization”, and “Development” sections of the Self Editing Check List (provided with permission from Laurie Waye, Centre for Academic Communication, University of Victoria).
- For more suggestions, see Revising and Editing (Margaret Proctor, Writing Support, University of Toronto).
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- Next: 10. Edit the draft >>
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Revise Your Draft to Make It Better
Steps for re-seeing and improving your first draft.
If you have seen Dead Poet’s Society, you’ll remember the iconic scene in which English teacher Mr. Keating (played by Robin Williams — Oh Captain! My Captain!) has his students stand on top of his desk to gain a new perspective. (If you haven’t seen this classic movie, go watch it now. It holds up well and is still highly inspirational.) Gaining a new perspective on your draft is what revising is all about. My motto for revising is always this: make the draft better.
Revising is the fourth step in the writing process, after prewriting, planning, and drafting, and before editing. As many writers have noted, the word “revision” means “to see again.” It’s not enough just to see your draft anew though. Once you re-see your draft, you have to make positive changes to it. You have to make it better.
Many great writers have commented on the importance of revising. William Zinsser says, “Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it’s where the game is won or lost.” Roald Dahl, the author of such great books as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach , among many others, says. “Good writing is essentially rewriting.” Stephen King says, “You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft — 10%.” (You know how long his books are — that’s a lot of revising!)
Revising and editing are different beasts. When you revise, you focus on bigger issues, such as content, your main point, organization, and some sentence-level grammar. When you edit, you fuss over the smaller though no less important issues of punctuation and mechanics, such as capitalization, the use of numbers, and the like.
In general, when you draft, you write for yourself. When you revise, you clarify for your readers. For instance, I write a lot about my family. If I mention Lisa or Anna or Kyle, that wouldn’t mean anything to my readers. So in my revision, I must clarify that Lisa is my sister, Anna is my niece, and Kyle is my great-nephew.
There are a few techniques to help you revise effectively.
Wait before revising
You need perspective to view a first draft effectively. Take a break between drafting and revising. If you are writing an essay in a matter of hours, your wait time may only be a half an hour. If you are writing a longer piece — a short story, an essay, a novel — your wait time may be days or weeks. Approach the act of revising with renewed focus and fresh eyes.
Revise from a printed copy
Working on paper allows you to see your writing without the glare of a lighted computer screen or phone shining in your eyes. You can write all over your paper copy and see the changes next to your first draft, allowing you to evaluate more effectively which is better.
Read your writing aloud
We can recognize errors in writing much more quickly when we hear them than to catch them with our eyes. In these days of spellcheck and auto-correct, the error gremlins are hard at work trying to subvert your best writing intentions. Reading aloud and working from paper copy will allow you to catch errors more effectively than working on an electronic screen.
Determine your main point
Read your draft with an eye toward your main point. Are you really saying what you want to say? Can you underline the exact sentence or sentences that communicate your one main point? If so, great! If not, get that main point in there for your reader.
Add and delete content
Have you included everything that your reader needs to understand your main point? If not, now is the time to add it. A more challenging issue is deleting unnecessary content. If a selection of sentences or a paragraph or two does not advance your main point, it’s ripe for deletion — even if it’s good writing. Cut out any unnecessary passages. But don’t throw them away. Create a new file with the deleted passages. Maybe you will find them useful in a future project. But if it doesn’t belong, get rid of it. Keeping it will only muddy the rest of your hard work.
Check your organization
Some writing is highly structured and hierarchical. Other writing wanders in and out of a topic like a meandering stream. Whatever your approach, make sure that your organization makes sense to your reader. It’s often helpful to have a reliable friend (not your mother, not your significant other, not your greatest fan) read your work critically to comment on the flow or organization of your writing. If they are confused, then it’s likely other readers will be confused too.
Rework introduction and conclusion to fit your writing
Even when we draft, we often are not clear about our main point. Once you have revised the body of your work, you can rework your introduction to more precisely fit the rest of your work. In the same way, now that you know what you want to say, you can fine tune your conclusion to emphasize your main point and provide a takeaway idea for your readers.
Revise for sentence-level grammar
I like to revise in two sessions — at least once for overall ideas and organization and at least once for sentence-level issues — grammar, use of forceful verbs, eliminating forms of “be, and minimizing passive voice. If I can say the same thing in 10 words where I once had 20, I consider that an improvement.
Depending on the project, I may have to revise many times. The bigger the project, the more revising will be necessary. The more unclear I am at the start, the more revising will be necessary to clarify my ideas. Once I start tinkering with the littler things — should I use “in to” or “into” or “can’t” “cannot” or “can not” — I have started editing. At this point, I am fairly certain my content is in good shape, which is my ultimate goal in revising.
Lee G. Hornbrook is a writer and 33-year higher education professional, including 22 years as an Adjunct Professor of college English in every time zone in the continental United States. He has traded teaching for working at Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library and writing as much as possible. He is on Twitter @awordpleaseblog and has a personal blog A Word, Please .
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The Importance of Revising Your Paper
Many students make the mistake of finishing a draft of their paper and handing it in. Not only are their papers often filled with typographical errors and other problems, but they lack the benefits of a fundamental stage in the writing process: revision.
When we revise our writing, we take the opportunity to step back and re-envision it. We think about the goals of the paper and whether we have accomplished these goals. We ensure that our ideas are clearly expressed and well supported. And, we make certain that errors of grammar and style do not detract from our work or make it look as though the paper was prepared hastily.
Keep the following rules of revision in mind:
- Do everything in your power NOT to hand in a first draft.
- Try to take a break (even if it is only 30 minutes) between drafting and revision. This will help you gain perspective.
- If you are feeling frustrated and stuck, involve someone else in your revision process. You can have a friend read it. Or, you can take a draft to the Academic Skills Centre.
Revising for Substance
As you read through your draft, ask yourself the following questions about the substance of your paper:
- Is your thesis clearly and firmly stated?
- Do you present your own analysis?
- Does your work fairly reflect the sources that you consulted?
- Do you include specific evidence to support your ideas? Is this evidence analyzed and explained?
- Are there gaps in your logic that need to be corrected?
- Do you fulfill all of the goals that you set out in the thesis?
- Have you met all of the instructions included with the assignment?
Revising for Structure
As you read, you need to ensure that your essay has a strong structure. Consider all of the questions below:
- Is there a clear and logical pattern by which you prove your thesis?
- Does your introduction give a clear indication of what the paper is about?
- Is each paragraph unified and developed?
- Does each paragraph contain a strong, clear topic sentence?
- Is each paragraph related to the thesis? You could create a reverse outline. See Creating an Effective Outline.
- Do you have transitions between paragraphs and between sections?
- Does your essay have a well-reasoned and interesting conclusion?
Revising for Style
Unclear writing and errors detract from your ideas and your mark. As you edit, you want to think about your writing style. Take the following issues into account:
- Have you used the passive voice too much?
- Did you make sure to use gender neutral language?
- Is your language precise and concise?
- Have you edited out repetitive language or syntax?
- Have you corrected grammatical errors and made sure that all of the names and events that you discuss are spelled properly?
- Is all of your information properly footnoted and do you have a bibliography that is correctly formatted?
Final Proofreading
Your final read-through of the draft should focus on formatting and accuracy – not substance. Use a hard-copy instead of just reading from your computer screen. You may want to read the words out loud. Check for:
- Spelling, typographical errors, correct word usage
- Italicize or underline titles of books and put titles of articles in quotation marks
- Correct documentation and bibliography
- Double Space (unless told otherwise)
- Create a Title Page that includes a title for your essay, your name, your section and tutorial leader’s name, and the date.
- Pagination. Use page numbers but do not use a page number on the title page.
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Proofreading is primarily about searching your writing for errors, both grammatical and typographical, before submitting your paper for an audience (a teacher, a publisher, etc.). Use this resource to help you find and fix common errors.
When you have plenty of time to revise, use the time to work on your paper and to take breaks from writing. If you can forget about your draft for a day or two, you may return to it with a fresh outlook. During the revising process, put your writing aside at least twice—once during the first part of the process, when you are reorganizing your work, and once during the second part, when you are polishing and paying attention to details.
Use the following questions to evaluate your drafts. You can use your responses to revise your papers by reorganizing them to make your best points stand out, by adding needed information, by eliminating irrelevant information, and by clarifying sections or sentences.
Find your main point.
What are you trying to say in the paper? In other words, try to summarize your thesis, or main point, and the evidence you are using to support that point. Try to imagine that this paper belongs to someone else. Does the paper have a clear thesis? Do you know what the paper is going to be about?
Identify your readers and your purpose.
What are you trying to do in the paper? In other words, are you trying to argue with the reading, to analyze the reading, to evaluate the reading, to apply the reading to another situation, or to accomplish another goal?
Evaluate your evidence.
Does the body of your paper support your thesis? Do you offer enough evidence to support your claim? If you are using quotations from the text as evidence, did you cite them properly?
Save only the good pieces.
Do all of the ideas relate back to the thesis? Is there anything that doesn't seem to fit? If so, you either need to change your thesis to reflect the idea or cut the idea.
Tighten and clean up your language.
Do all of the ideas in the paper make sense? Are there unclear or confusing ideas or sentences? Read your paper out loud and listen for awkward pauses and unclear ideas. Cut out extra words, vagueness, and misused words.
Visit the Purdue OWL's vidcast on cutting during the revision phase for more help with this task.
Eliminate mistakes in grammar and usage.
Do you see any problems with grammar, punctuation, or spelling? If you think something is wrong, you should make a note of it, even if you don't know how to fix it. You can always talk to a Writing Lab tutor about how to correct errors.
Switch from writer-centered to reader-centered.
Try to detach yourself from what you've written; pretend that you are reviewing someone else's work. What would you say is the most successful part of your paper? Why? How could this part be made even better? What would you say is the least successful part of your paper? Why? How could this part be improved?
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How to Revise · First, put your draft aside for a little while. Time away from your essay will allow for more objective self-evaluation. · Check the focus of the
After you finish the first draft of an essay, a sense of calm settles over your body. “At last,” you say, “I'm done.” We all write to various stages of
This handout will motivate you to revise your drafts and give you ... The key is still to give yourself enough time to look at the essay as a whole once
One is that if you revise only as you go along, you never get to think of the big picture. The key is still to give yourself enough time to look at the essay as
Allow enough time for revision, and allow some time between the drafting and revising. B. Focus on global issues first—those issues that are important to the
Revise the draft · Does your work achieve the outcomes of the assignment? · Major revisions, such as needing to add, delete, move, or rework large
peer-response group, revise it into a topic outline. Then, be ready to explain ... Draft either the entire essay or chunks of a few paragraphs at one time.
You need perspective to view a first draft effectively. Take a break between drafting and revising. If you are writing an essay in a matter of
Do everything in your power NOT to hand in a first draft. Try to take a break (even if it is only 30 minutes) between drafting and revision. This will help you
When you have plenty of time to revise, use the time to work on your paper and to take breaks from writing. If you can forget about your draft for a day or