Rewriting: How To Do Things With Texts

5 Revising

98 5 Revising First Draft of Paper Inadvertently Becomes Final Draft EUGENE, OR—The first draft of an English 140 paper by University of Oregon sophomore Marty Blain ultimately became the final draft, Blain reported Monday. “I was gonna keep working on it and add a bunch of stuff about how the guy who wrote [The Great Gatsby] was affected by a lot of the stuff going on around him,” she said.“But then I was like, fuck it.” Blair said that she spent the time that would have been devoted to revision watching Friends in her dorm’s TV lounge. —The Onion, September 27, 2000 I’m dying for some action I’m sick of sitting ’round here trying to write this book. —Bruce Springsteen,“Dancing in the Dark” So far in this book I’ve offered you four moves for rewriting—for making the words, ideas, and images of others part of your own project as a writer. In this last chapter, I propose some ways of using those moves in revising—that is, in rethinking, refining, and developing— your own work-in-progress as writer. Revising is thus a particular form of what throughout this book I’ve called rewriting; it names the work of returning to a draft of a text you’ve written in order to make your thinking in it more nuanced, precise, suggestive, and interesting. My method here will be to work in the mode of the previous four chapters —to ask what it might mean to come to terms with, forward, counter, Revising 99 or take the approach of your own text-in-progress. My hope is that doing so will allow me offer a view of revising that, on the one hand, doesn’t reduce it to a mere fiddling with sentences, to editing for style and correctness, but that also, on the other hand, avoids lapsing into mystical exhortations for risk taking or critical self-awareness or some other vague but evidently desirable quality of mind. My aim is instead to describe revising as a knowable practice, as a consistent set of questions you can ask of a draft of an essay that you are working on: • What’s your project? What do you want to accomplish in this essay ? (Coming to Terms) • What works? How can you build on the strengths of your draft? (Forwarding) • What else might be said? How might you acknowledge other views and possibilities? (Countering) • What’s next? What are the implications of what you have to say? (Taking an Approach) While these questions are straightforward, they are not easy. Revising is the sort of thing that is fairly simple to describe but very hard to do well—like playing chess, or serving in tennis, or teaching a class. It is also an activity that tends to be hidden from view. As readers we usually come upon texts in their final form—with many of the hesitations, repetitions, digressions, false starts, alternative phrasings, inconsistencies, speculations, infelicities, and flat-out mistakes of earlier drafts smoothed over, corrected, or erased. Another way to put this is to say that finished texts tend to conceal much of the labor involved in writing them. Since we rarely get to see the early drafts of most published texts, it can often seem as though other writers work, as it were, without ever blotting a line, confidently progressing through their texts from start to finish, paragraph to paragraph, chapter to chapter, as if they were speaking them aloud. This one-draft view of writing is reinforced by most movie and TV depictions of writers at work, as we watch them quickly type perfectly balanced and sequenced sentences until, with a sigh of satisfaction, they pound out The End or press Send. It is also a view inculcated by the pace and structure of American schooling, whose frequent exams reward students who can produce quick clean essays 100 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts on demand. A result is that much of what little instruction that does get offered in writing tends to focus on questions of correctness. Handbooks are filled with advice on proofreading and teachers downgrade for mistakes in grammar and spelling. But while the moments of both inspiration and correction, of creating a text and fixing its errors, are well marked in our culture, the work of revision, of rethinking and reshaping a text, is rarely...