Drafting and Revising
Will Rogers
Student Learning Outcomes
- Define drafting and revising
- Develop strategies for drafting and revising
Introduction to Drafting and Revising
Throughout this chapter, we’ll discuss some of the methods we can use for drafting essays, but remember that your drafting process is yours to choose. Find a method that produces the kinds of writing that reflect both your ideas and your writing voice. Many instructors recommend a practice that is referred to as fast drafting, in which the student writes under the pressure of a time limit, much like freewriting. This allows students to create without their inner critic undermining their momentum. It empowers the “creator hand” to work with agency while silencing the “editor hand.” It is important to note that creating on one hand and editing and revising on the other are not, however, stages that exist respectively at the beginning and the end. You might, for example, revise and edit some of your drafts before deciding to add more new material. And as the section below makes clear, the editing and creating “hands” are very similar often in the stages of revision.
Drafting
To do fast drafting, students first need to set up the conditions that will help in their success and are appropriate to their abilities to focus. The following are easy steps writers follow:
- Create a block of time in which there are no interruptions. This should be a realistic length, given a writer’s ability to focus, from 10 minutes at a time to 75 minutes or longer.
- Decide on the goal: Write a paragraph in 10 minutes, 2 pages in 1 hour, or a complete essay in 1 hour and 15 minutes.
For some, 75 minutes is a good length, but some students find that after 30 minutes, they can no longer concentrate. If that is the case, they should plan on several shorter sessions of distraction-free time.
During this time, students should turn off their phones and social media, let the dog outside, and ensure that it’s time for children to sleep. This needs to be quiet, concentrated time.
As the section above makes clear, drafting can be messy—you might include ideas that you later cut, and it is wise to maintain a separate file for this material as you work through the writing process. But again, you should let go of your worries about good and bad ideas. There will be time to rethink, rephrase, and rework during the revision process.
Revising
The Revision Process
Revision literally means to re-see or re-envision a piece of writing. This process may involve adding, rearranging, removing, and replacing (ARRR) words, sentences, and ideas. Since writing is recursive, revising may require revisiting the prewriting stage. A recursive process means that you will create, edit, and revise and return at various points to all three of these stages. Writing is not a strictly linear act, with a beginning, middle, and end. In fact, revision will help you understand that the writing process is as important as the writing product!