Do I really have to revise?
I get this question a lot when I teach writing. What matters here isn’t whether you should revise or not. It’s why the student asked.
Why does revising feel bad? Because it’s hard work. (When you start wondering why you have to do something, it’s usually because it’s hard work.)
Nobody ever taught them how to revise, or how much it pays off. That’s where the dislike comes from.
There’s also the embarrassment of facing your own writing, and the resistance to admitting it falls short.
If someone already resists revising, telling them “you still have to revise” helps nobody. A good answer shows how much it pays off and how to do it without the pain.
So today, why revising is worth it, and a four-step method that makes it easy.
But what exactly is revising?
We should start with what the word means. The Korean word for revising, 퇴고 (推敲), comes from a short story. Oddly enough, the story carries the whole idea of revision inside it.
A Tang dynasty poet named Jia Dao was riding along when a poem came to him. He got stuck on one character: push (推), or knock (敲)?
The poet Jia Dao https://baike.baidu.hk/item/%E8%B3%88%E5%B3%B6%E6%8E%A8%E6%95%B2/7537545
Still chewing on it as he went, he ran into the carriage of Han Yu, a senior official and the finest writer of the Tang dynasty. Jia Dao apologized and explained what had been on his mind. Han Yu forgave him, said knock (敲) was the better word, and finished the poem.
That short story holds the core of revision. First, revising is the act of turning something over, the way Jia Dao did. Second, the answer sits with a reader, the way it sat with Han Yu.
So revising is reading from the reader’s side and thinking it over. If revising feels like staring at a wall, it’s because the writer is still reading from their own side. Think from the reader’s side and what to change gets clear.
So what do you get out of revising?
Revising is what makes writing easy.
Finishing a first draft is a relief, and it feels good.
Going back to look at it again is annoying. You just wrote the thing! Writing it over sounds like a chore.
But there’s a twist. Revising is what makes writing easier. Getting a draft right with no revision is ten times harder.
Writing well on the first pass is hard. Getting what’s in your head onto the page is not an easy job.
Usually we’ve barely written about the topic before. So we don’t know what the idea looks like once it’s on the page.
A thought floating in your head and the same thought written out are two different things. Plenty of ideas that sound reasonable in your head come out contradictory and awkward once they’re down.
On top of that, thinking happens alone, while writing is a process of persuading someone else (the purpose statement). Putting my thoughts in a form another person can follow is not easy.
So a first draft is a gamble. Until you write it, you can’t tell whether it’s good or bad. And like most gambles, most first drafts lose.
We still want the draft to come out well. And what happens when you try? You freeze. You hesitate over a single sentence, and sometimes you give up before the draft is finished.
Good writing takes two activities: making the writing, and judging what to change. To nail the first draft you’d have to do both at once, and people are bad at doing two things at once. So write first, fix second. It’s much easier and much faster.
Treat the first draft as something you’re going to throw away, and write it loose. Deciding up front that revision is where the piece gets finished takes the pressure off.
While writing, try a lot of things. While revising, keep only the best of what you tried.
Split the draft from the revision like that and writing gets easy and fast.
While drafting, put your attention on getting the thought out. It doesn’t have to be good. What matters is writing enough to feel what you want to say and how it sounds.
The message and its persuasive force are the two things a piece of writing lives on. Most people write without knowing either, which is how vague writing happens. Checking those two is where revision starts.
So revise the thinking first.
1. Revise the thinking first.
Writing is a way to carry my thinking to someone else, which makes thinking the raw material. If the thinking is thin or contradicts itself, the writing won’t persuade anyone.
So when you revise a piece, revise the thinking first.
As I said above, until you express it you don’t know what you’re actually thinking (the message), or how that thinking looks to someone else (the persuasive force).
That’s what an outline and a first draft are for. Revision starts in the same place.
So revision begins by checking whether the message (the purpose statement) is clear and whether it persuades.
Didn’t we check that before writing the draft? The view then and the view now are different.
Writing the draft made you think hard about the purpose statement and the outline. So go back over it and start by asking whether either one needs to change.
Then look at the large structure and ask these:
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Is the purpose statement (the message) clear?
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Does the piece contradict itself?
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Does the claim have enough support?
Look for contradictions or repetition in the logic, and for the point where the reader runs out of momentum. You don’t need to check the small stuff yet (whether the writing is easy to follow, whether a sentence is tangled, whether a phrase is exact). There’s a separate step for the small stuff. Right now you only need to decide whether the core message has to change, and whether the outline or the shape of the piece has to change. Fix the flow first.
If the subject and the outline hold up, it’s time to work on sentences and phrasing.
How do you revise sentences and phrasing? Again, you read from the reader’s side.
I’ll go through the specific method step by step.