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Practice Revising on Other People's Writing |
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What makes revising hard is not so much the actual skills you must use. I will describe them in the following pages. These skills are demanding, but we could learn them steadily and easily if we didn't have to learn them on our own writing. Surgeons don't learn cutting skills by turning the knife on themselves. It feels like cutting your own flesh to take your own writing apart, rearrange it, and throw away large chunks. Use the knife on other people's writing and you will learn quicker not only the outward techniques of good revising, but also the essential inner reaction that will lead you to those techniques: an intolerance for something that doesn't work and a willingness to make changes even if it means discarding wonderful stuff. Once you get comfortable wielding the knife and seeing blood on the floor, it turns out to be easier to wield it on yourself. It is easy to get together with a few others and practice revising by revising each other's drafts. In addition each writer will get three or four rewrites of his draft. This is good feedback -- if sometimes painful: a re-drafting is a re-seeing of what you've written. What's really hard about revising is to believe that what you have written can undergo major cutting and changing and still say what you mean. When someone shows you how to say it more simply and in less space -- whether by cutting and rearranging your words or by rewriting it afresh in his own words -- it makes you more willing to practice cutting and recasting your own words. But even if for some reason you don't want to work with others in this way, there is writing all around you that needs revising. Choose the kind of writing you want to work on. Revise articles, reports, or memos that come across your desk. Translate poems. Newspapers and magazines are full of writing that needs revision: stories, arguments, letters, essays, how-to-do-its. Most of it was written and revised in a rush. Because these things are set so neatly in print and don't for the most part have mistakes in spelling and grammar, they often feel as though they belong just the way they are. It's hard to undress them in your mind and see how they could look -- how they could be organized or conceptualized differently. But that's exactly the skill you need for revising. Your own writing is similarly hard to undress and reconceptualize -- not because it's neatly printed without errors, but because it is yours. If you revise published writing, you may fear you will make it worse rather than better. You probably won't, but even if you do, you get the essential practice of cutting, reconceiving, and reordering. Revising someone else's words gives you an especially good oportunity to find out how words work on readers. Since beginnings are so crucial in determining whether a reader fights the words or goes along with them, it is especially useful to test different beginnings for the same piece: a quick overview for business-like perspective; an informal or even chatty statement directly to the reader; an anecdote that introduces the topic; an example that somehow symbolizes it. Since it is easier to fool around with the writing of others, you can fairly quickly turn out alternate versions of an entire piece. Try different tones: chatty, authoritative, ironic. Try different ways of organizing: starting with the conclusion, building up to it last. Persuade with reasoning, with anecdote. Hide the weak arguments, admit them openly. Try to write it in half the length. Try different formats on the page such as lists or pictures or diagrams. Of course you can do the same thing with stories, essays, poems. You can make these controlled experiments with your own writing, too-and this practice will lead you to do so -- but it's much easier to start with someone else's writing. By the way, when you revise someone else's writing you are, in effect, collaborating. If you try it you will notice an interesting method for collaborative writing. Three people might proceed as follows: A writes a rough think-piece or discussion-piece (perhaps they had a preliminary discussion, but not necessarily, and they didn't have to try to agree with each other); everyone reads it and discusses the issues (not the quality of A's writing); B takes notes on the discussion and then writes his own fresh draft -- not trying, however, to get everything right since things are still in process; everyone discusses B's draft in order to advance the group's thinking and to decide where the draft reflects their agreement and where it doesn't; C takes notes and then writes a near-to-final draft; all give feedback and someone' does final editing. This method is especially useful if the collaboration must be conducted by mail: everyone can mail their thoughts and reactions to the next writer. This method usually achieves more genuine collaboration than other methods (where one person really does all the writing and gives his imprint to the piece; or where the authors each write one segment and the resulting piece lacks integration and smooth joints). Most important, it leads to the best sort of thinking -- andwriting: new ideas emerge in mid-course that all agree on -- that feel like "just what we wanted to say" -- but that are original. The process may sound like much more work, but often it is not because it involves such unpressured writing. People churn out their drafts quickly and get good practice in writing because no draft has to be "just right" till it's obvious what " just right" is.
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