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Where the leverage in quick revising comes from stepping out of your skin and being someone else, the leverage in thorough revising comes from time. Not just work time, but putting-it-away-andforgetting-about-it time. What you can accomplish in three hours of wrestling with your draft can be accomplished in one hour -- and a much less frustrating hour, too -- if you first set it aside for a day or two. Indeed, there are some improvements you can never achieve through wrestling alone, such as a fresh conception of your material. Often you can only find a new shape for your piece if you take a vacation -- a time for forgetting, for preconscious work, for letting it get bumped out of shape by an experience from an entirely different part of your life. So make sure that at least on two occasions during the thorough revising process you put your writing aside long enough to forget about it -- a couple of days or better yet a couple of weeks: once during the first half when you are hammering out and organizing the thing as a whole and once during the second half when you are cleaning up and polishing and paying more attention to details of language.
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