Revising

Writing is an essential part of working out your ideas. You do not really understand something until you are able to convey it to someone else. Moreover, you should not expect to work out your ideas in one attempt—everyone needs to revise!

In the first draft of a piece or in your preparatory notes you are inventing the problem; delineating the main points. You're getting your thoughts out to arrive at a working set of words. Once you have this much of a paper you can (re)organize those points, and after (re)writing the paper you can better identify the weaknesses in it.

Revision begins with a commitment to do more than make cosmetic changes in wording and fine-tuning your word use. Instead, you need to allow yourself to re-envision the paper. Does it need major restructuring? How does each paragraph connect with the previous one, and to the paper as a whole? Try shifting sections around; incorporate new insights as they arise. Also ask yourself: Is what I have written true? Have I written about what I set out to write? If not, why not? Have I changed my mind? Re-envisioning requires some distance from your draft. Spend some hours or a day away from it, nominally doing something else but remaining pre-occupied with your paper, letting it digest. Jot down notes wherever you are when the ideas come to you so you can try them out when you return to your writing table.

Next, fill the holes. What transitions and links are weak or missing? (Words such as "surely," "it seems," "logically," and so on are common signs of connections unmade.) What are your blind spots? Are you avoiding admitting to yourself that you need to do more research? Think about the holes in your information and your argument: can you fill them? Have you provided examples? Have you anticipated counter-arguments? Long sentences with many loosely linked ideas are cues that you need to divide the sentence and develop each idea separately.

Perhaps you feel that you know the meaning of what you have written, so there is nothing to change. If so, then read it to someone else. Do they follow what you mean? Frustratingly, they may not. You may even feel they are being thick or difficult in not understanding you. Perhaps they are. Nevertheless, if you clarify your writing so that bothersome readers can follow it, you will probably improve the reading experience for others who could already understand you.

Revision should be proactive, that is, do not wait for your advisors to slog their way through a rough draft and identify problems in your exposition for you. Before every sentence, paragraph and section ask yourself: What am I trying to say? What words or phrases express that idea best? After writing a paragraph, check to make sure it is about what you said it would be about.

Take responsibility for what you're saying. The passive voice may be useful for variety, but do not use it to avoid thinking through an issue. Instead, identify the group or person hidden behind a passive construction.

You should also be prepared to delete as well as to add. It is often harder to delete than to add because it is difficult to overcome your investment in what you have already written. Nevertheless, deletion is an important part of revision.

The aim of writing is not to explain everything for all time, but to achieve some temporary closure. If you cannot fill a hole at this point in time, make clear those places where you—or the field in general—need to do further work. In a few weeks you may know more, but the appropriate question is whether you have finished with the paper for the moment.

After such self-scrutiny and revision you should know exactly what it is you want to say, and the next level of revision, the fine-tuning of vocabulary to achieve the desired connotations, should be much easier. Watch out for gobbledegook and jargon. Clean this out as much as possible and use plain English.

Finally, even when typing the final draft you should be thinking and not merely transcribing, remaining open to opportunities to rewrite and restructure your paper so you are saying what you want to as well as you can.