Offered here are some suggestions aimed at making your revising stage as effective as possible. These suggestions are based on years of writing experience, but they are only suggestions, not ironclad rules.
Suggestion 1: Give Yourself Some Breathing Space
After you’ve finished your first draft, give yourself some time—at least 24 hours—before you begin the revising process. This “breathing space” gives you some distance from your work, which you will need in order to review it objectively. And it gives your unconscious an opportunity to mull over the material, so that when you return to the argument, you’ll find you have fresh ideas about how to make it more effective. You’ve probably had the experience of rereading a graded paper and wondering how you could have missed the problems that seem so obvious to you now (and that were far too obvious to your instructor). Putting some distance between the first draft and the revision gives you an opportunity to gain this fresh perspective, and to put it to use before your paper is graded.
Suggestion 2: Avoid the Red Pen
As you’re reviewing your first draft, avoid the lure of the red pen or typing in any changes if you are reading from the screen—the temptation to make small editorial changes before you have reread and assimilated the argument as a whole. Reread with your hands tied behind your back (figuratively, that is), and you’ll get a much better sense of how the draft works as a whole.
Suggestion 3: Review Your Original Purpose and Audience
In writing your first draft, you’ve been intent on coming up with the right word and composing individual sentences. It’s easy at this level to lose touch with your original purpose and intended audience. So an important question to ask yourself as you’re rereading and revising is whether you’ve fulfilled your original purpose for your intended audience (of course, your original purpose and audience may have changed during the first draft, but that should be your conscious choice, not an accident).
It can be helpful to review your argument pretending that you’re one of its intended readers. From this perspective, you can ask yourself: do I understand the purpose and claim of this argument? are the vocabulary and specialized terms clear to me? is the argument meaningful to me? am I convinced by the argument?
Suggestion 4: Review Your Organization
In reviewing the effectiveness of your argument, you’ll need to consider not only your purpose and audience, but also the overall organization of what you’ve written, making sure that the parts fit together well and are logically sequenced, that nothing crucial is omitted, and that the structure is lean, with a minimum of repetition. If it’s hard to keep the organization in mind, try reproducing it in outline form, as in the following model. Remember, you’re outlining what you actually wrote, not what you intended to write. If you actually wrote your draft from an outline, don’t look at it until you have completed this new one.
I. Introduction (if appropriate)
II. Claim (if appropriate)
III. Supporting arguments:
A.
B.
C.
D.
IV. Conclusion or summary (if appropriate)
If you have trouble constructing this new outline, your argument probably has organizational problems that need attention.
This is also a good time to review the effectiveness of your claim and your introduction. Ask yourself these questions: if I have an explicit claim, is it clearly stated? if it is implied, will my readers recognize it? does my introduction prepare my readers for what follows? should it be more interesting?
Suggestion 5: Review Your Argument’s Coherence
Even the most carefully organized argument will puzzle readers if the relationship between its parts is not indicated in some way. In certain professions and businesses, standard formats include headings like “Introduction,” “The Problem,” “History,” and so on. But such headings are inappropriate in many settings. You can make the elements of your argument coherent—establish their relationship to one another and to the whole—by using simple transitional words and expressions that indicate the nature of the relationship.
Words like therefore, thus, so, and consequently identify a conclusion and its evidence. Words like but, however, and on the other hand indicate exceptions to a stated point. You can alert your reader to the introduction of each new piece of support by using indicators such as first ..., second ..., and furthermore, and finally. Transitional words and expressions such as these are enormously useful to readers of arguments, particularly when the argument is long or elaborate. They help readers understand how one statement or section that may otherwise seem a digression or an irrelevancy relates to what has gone before or what might come later.
As well as using such brief signposts, you can also be quite direct about the role of different parts of your argument. Public speakers are often very explicit about the function of crucial parts of their speeches: “Let me give you two reasons why this land should be developed,” or “To conclude, I’d like to remind you of a few lines by Walt Whitman.” Such obvious signs are crucial when there is no written text for an audience to follow and ponder. But indicators such as these can be used in written argument as well, especially when the parts are many and complex.
Suggestion 6: Review Your Style
The revising stage is the time to consider the effectiveness of your argument’s style: its tone, word choice, and general treatment of the reader. Style is a crucial component of argument, often playing a major role in convincing or alienating readers. Poor style is just as damaging to an argument as a vague or unsupported claim; an effective style is just as convincing as compelling evidence. And while you’re considering your style, think about the ethos projected by your argument: does the argument reflect a writer who is fair, open-minded, and appropriately confident?
This is also a good time to ask yourself if you have followed Orwell’s rules for clarity offered in a separate blog entry about The Economist Style Guide. Finally, check your draft to see if you have (1) used connotation effectively, (2) avoided slanting, (3) used metaphor and analogy effectively, and (4) paid attention to the sounds of words. Some of these questions will naturally occur during your consideration of claim (if you have one) and the organization of its support, as well as during your review of audience and purpose.
Suggestion 7: Review Your Argument for Faulty Reasoning
The “informal fallacies” you may have used are most easily detected during the revision stage. As a final step in reviewing your argument, read it through to detect any unwitting fallacies, paying special attention to those that are particularly common in the kind of argument you’ve written.
Suggestion 8: Use a Word Processor
Fortunately (some students would say unfortunately), revising may lead to a drastic overhaul of your argument. But if you want your argument to be as good as it can be, you won’t ignore the opportunity to make these major changes. Most students now write their papers on computers, which make large- and small-scale revising much easier than any other method. With a computer and a good word-processing program, you can switch entire sections of a draft around with ease; change words swiftly and even “globally,” so that one word replaces another throughout an entire essay; and make corrections with no trace of erasures or correction fluid. Virtually all campuses have computer labs for their students, which save the expense of purchasing your own computer. And while a computer will not make you a better writer, it will give you the chance to make yourself a better writer. So get wired!
Extracted from “Everyday Arguments ~ A Guide to Writing and Reading Effective Arguments" by Katherine J. Mayberry (2009)
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