AcWriMo: what i do while drafting / what i do in revising

there is a lot that goes unsaid and untaught in the world of academic writing. i feel that most advisors/supervisors/director of graduate studies/even some first year seminar leaders take the stance of "you should already know how to do this" or "i'm sure you've learned this before". as someone who works with writers all around the world at all kinds of universities in all sorts of disciplines: NOPE. it is much more rare that i meet someone who was given a comprehensive toolkit for academic writing than someone who was given nothing. so, if you are trying to figure it all out, you are definitely not alone!

academic writing is a collection of skills that in theory, have an order of operations:

read

draft 

revise

submit

but there is also a LOT of flexibility within that - some people bounce between the first three stages frequently, some pass through them with relatively equal time spent in each, and some move through it differently depending on the project, or their own brain at the time. 

one thing that i do find consistently though is that i work with writers who are, consciously or not, spending a lot of time drafting (ie, generating new words) and working with facets of their writing that would actually be more easily addressed in a revision stage. what do i mean? great question!

for example, you could be writing along and you start to really notice your transitions (or lack thereof). maybe an advisor gave you feedback on another draft about transitions, or you saw a twitter thread about them, or someone mentioned them in passing - but you're thinking about them in an early-ish draft stage. so you spend a lot of time learning about transitions (here's one of my favorite resources on them!) and you spend a whole day crafting the transitions for a section of your new chapter. 

now, there's nothing wrong with that! sometimes it feels good to practice a skill or go deep on a new facet of your writing but also, you might have just spent a bunch of time creating the world's most beautiful transitions only to complete restructure that chapter in a few weeks, and have to redo them. it's not that you should NEVER work with your transitions, but rather that there are more and less efficient times to do so. 

so here is a very rough, moderately personal list of what skills i tend to focus on in early draft phases, and what i tend to do in later revisions! feel free to take what works and leave the rest, but the aim here is to be explicit so you can check your own workflow and see if there's anything you want to experiment with!

things i do during drafting (mostly)

• freewriting

• rough restructuring (taking big chunks and rearranging them)

• trying to figure out WHAT i'm trying to say

• figuring out the scope of what does and does not belong in what piece i'm working on

things i do during revision (mostly)

• checking on accuracy of quotations / facts / etc

• argument (how strongly am i arguing something, what kinds of arguments, etc)

• transitions

• sentence structure

• writing the introduction and conclusion

• writing abstracts

• checking for flow

most of us are not used to revising work even once, much less multiple times so that balance can feel really off if you're not used to it! but revision is where a bulk of the work to take a piece from "some thoughts about something" into "a cohesive argument" happens! and more people should talk about that. 

AcWriMo2020: revise on purpose

so much of what i support clients with in the world of academic writing is normalizing a longer writing process. so many people go to grad school, in part, because they’re good at writing. and when the writing product changes from a 20 page term paper to a 200+ page thesis, it can seem like everything you knew before doesn’t work now, and you are, in fact, bad at writing.

and usually, it isn’t that the client is bad at writing - it’s that they’re not used to writing in an iterative way, and they almost always have no real experience with substantial revision. sure, they might have proofread a paper a time or two, or cleared up some unclear sentences, but they’ve never substantially reworked a piece following feedback.

and if you are used to writing pretty complete drafts and only lightly going over them for minor errors, it can be completely bewildering to sit with a sh*tty first draft, or a draft that needs substantial work, and know what to do next. how do you take a pile of incomplete sentences and turn it into something readable? how do you complete rework an argument without starting over?

the answer: you revise.

there are as many ways to revise as there are to write, but here are a few of my most favorite/useful techniques, and a few reminders to help ground this process:

• in order to revise, you have to know what you’ve already written. i like to go back and annotate my work like it was a piece by a stranger - i’ll ask questions in the margins, highlight the main point of paragraphs, maybe even make an outline of the ideas and the order that they’re presented. people often skip this step - and it really helps to get this overall view before you start to do any big structural changes.

• take all the topic sentences (first sentence and/or most important sentence) in each paragraph and reorder those into a better/different flow. can be less cumbersome than moving around whole paragraphs.

• know that it might take SEVERAL passes of revision. i often ignore all the mechanical things (grammar, sentence structure, spelling) until my last few passes because if i move everything around, i usually end up rewriting things anyway.

• do targeted revision passes: this one checks for subject verb agreement - this one focuses on transitions - this one i’m focusing on clearing up my argument. this can help when you feel overwhelmed with all that needs to change in a draft.

• change the font style and size when doing a final pass to check for typos. this can move the words around on the page and help you see it with fresh perspective.

• use the read aloud function in your browser or word processing function to check for any sentence weirdness.

• use the “save as” feature to save different versions (and use a consistent file naming system!) and help yourself keep track of what changes have been made.

but most, most important:

revision is part of the writing. budget time for it. budget energy for it. it takes a lot of brain power! there are so many decisions to be made! so make sure you’re giving yourself credit for it, and not internalizing the fact that you are revising as punishment for being a bad writer. it isn’t. it’s what makes good writing great.