Hi, when we were discussing the writing process, I think I mentioned that I spend an inordinately long time in the revision stage. That's because I keep rethinking and reshaping and perfecting my work. I'm hoping to provide a little bit more of a concise process for you, with revising, and we'll be thinking today about strategies for revision. The best strategy I have for you is distance and time. You need time to be able to not think about a particular writing project in order to come back and look at it with fresh eyes. If you try to revise at the same time as you're writing it and submitting it, and you want to be done with it all within, you know, a certain small time frame, you're not going to have that critical distance that you need to be able to rethink what you're saying and read it from anew. So you really need distance and time—not too much—you don't want to lose touch with your project, but you want to create a little bit of distance. That will be different for every writer, right? I, and depending on the project too, so some projects I need to take two or three days away from every once in a while, and other projects maybe just an afternoon. And then of course, time demands kind of will get in the way sometimes, but you want to aim for distance and time. The second best strategy I have for you is to read aloud. Find a place where you can read your writing aloud. You're going to encounter all kinds of material in there that you didn't know was in there or ideas that you didn't know. This also enables you to kind of approach your writing from a new perspective. Revise first, and then edit and proofread. Remember, you don't want to spend your time correcting small parts of a piece of writing if you're going to end up deleting an entire paragraph anyways, or if you're going to rethink the structure. You wouldn't want to write a beautiful transition sentence between paragraphs if you're going to move those paragraphs ultimately, so think globally. So do revision first, and then move to the editing and the proofreading. Get feedback. This is so important. As much as you want to be a fresh reader for your work, with distance and time and reading aloud, you also want to get feedback from somebody. I would never submit a piece of my own writing for potential publication if I hadn't gotten lots of feedback from other people. It's such a valuable, valuable part of the process. So, you too shouldn't submit a piece of writing until you've gotten feedback on it, and that's what we're building into the work of this class. One practical strategy for revising is to create a reverse outline. We actually already talked about another practical strategy, which is a revision plan—taking 30 seconds, 60 seconds, sometimes 2 minutes, to write out a plan for what you are going to revise. This second strategy is called a reverse outline. It helps you identify whether the organization of a piece of writing makes sense to you. Whether point 1, point 2, point 3, point 4, point 5, kind of works in a way that forwards your project's agenda. It also helps you identify paragraph unity. Paragraph unity is the concept that each paragraph should offer one main significant idea, so if your paragraph has five incredibly important things in it, that might be too much. Readers have trouble kind of digesting that much information. So you want to think about paragraphs as offering kind of bite sized portions for your readers, right? Like one bite at a time, one sip at a time, don't flood a paragraph with all the great things that you have to say. Reverse outlining, which I'll show you an example of in a second, is also helpful in terms of identifying the cohesion. Do all the pieces of a particular project work together? Maybe you have something important, but irrelevant, right, somewhere along the way, so you don't just want to delete it and throw it away, but you want to delete it and maybe save it somewhere else for another subsequent writing project. I'm going to show you an example of how to do a reverse outline, and I'm going to urge you to please go ahead and do a reverse outline on your own draft of Major Project 1, even before you get other feedback, or after you get other feedback, so that you can also be revising your own project. With a reverse outline, it's called a “reverse outline” because it happens at the other end of the writing process. Usually we think of outlines as happening during a prewriting phase, right, where you're planning what you're going to say. I use outlines actually during drafting also because I'll get confused about where I'm going, and I want to think about my main points. But a reverse outline happens sort of at the end of the process, after you have a really full draft that you're ready to really work with and revise, and it entails taking each paragraph and writing a one or two or three word phrase. Now, you're going to catch me in case I write like a four or five word phrase, it's going to be, right, anyway. In as few words as you can, just capture what that paragraph is doing, what the function is within the argument, or what the concept is. You want to try to write down, in the side margin, what's happening in that paragraph. And by the end, what you'll have is a whole list, right, a whole outline of your project, where you can rethink whether the organization works, whether everything is cohesive. If you get to a paragraph and you have difficulty coming up with a very succinct phrase, or key concept, that might mean that you have just too much going on in that paragraph, and so that's an indicator that you want to break that paragraph up. So we're using Daniel Coyle's "The Sweet Spot" as an example here. And this would be if I were pretending to be Coyle, right, revising my work, so you're going to do this with your own project. But for this paragraph, I would probably write "Brunio, soccer, and the soccer move,” okay, that he keeps trying to perfect. And for this paragraph, I'm going to write “Jenny, singer, big finish,” which is what she keeps trying to perfect. Next to this paragraph, I always like questions, and I always focus on questions. If you have written a question in your project, that could be the actual phrase that you bring out in your reverse outline. So in this, if I were Coyle, what I would write would be, “How does screwing up work?” and this paragraph seems to be doing a couple things: It seems to be offering an overview of Brazilian soccer, and then also, documenting its success, somewhat unique success. And so that's a sample of what a reverse outline is, and if I were Coyle, what I would do at that point is look at my entire reverse outline for my whole project and decide what I wanted to move or change or reimagine. So, again, please do try out a reverse outline on your Major Project 1, and then you'll be able to reevaluate with fresh eyes what you want to do with your revision.
