Tips for Revisions

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Revising is rewriting. 

To revise, evaluate, change, and reevaluate your draft to figure out ways to improve it. To do so, read your writing honestly without losing confidence or becoming defensive. Look at whatever you change and evaluate the revision first on its own and then in the context of the surrounding material. Continue until you're satisfied that your work is the best you can make it (relative to the writing assignment).

Goals and activities during revision: prepare your wind for revising.

a.) Shift mentally from suspending judgment (during idea gathering and drafting) to making judgments. Read your draft objectively with "a cold eye" to evaluate it.

b.) Decide whether to write an entirely new draft or to revise the one you have. Be critical as you evaluate your first draft, but don't be overly harsh. Many early drafts provide sufficient raw material for revision to get under way.

c.) Be systematic. Don't evaluate at random. Most writers work best when they concentrate on each element sequentially. Start with your draft's overall organization; next, move to its paragraphs, then to its sentences, and finally to its word choice. 

Finally but not in the least, as you're revising, don't start EDITING too soon. Editing comes after revising. Research shows that premature editing distracts writers from dealing with the larger issues that revision involves.

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