Revising for Higher Order Concerns

Estimated Time: 1 hour

🎉Congratulations! You have completed your first draft! Now it's time to let your inner judge loose to ensure that your writing achieves your purpose.

When we revise our drafts, we typically think about correcting things like grammar, spelling mistakes, and punctuation. However, these are lower-order concerns that you can manage later when editing. To get the most out of revising, you should start by focusing on the higher-order concerns around your content, how it's organised, and if it flows coherently at the service of achieving your purpose.

To do this, read your draft and ask yourself the following questions:

• What do I want to accomplish with my writing, and does it currently achieve that purpose?
• Have I left out any information that would help me achieve my purpose?
• Does my draft contain any content that should be removed because it doesn't help me achieve my purpose?
• Are there places where my writing doesn't make sense?
• Are the pieces of my writing in the correct order? Do they flow logically?

If you have gone through the Planning and Structuring steps, you should have the information you need to answer these questions. The 7Cs of Communication are also useful here. While all the Cs are important, during revision, you can focus on:

• Courtesy: See things from the audience's point of view
• Completeness: Include all necessary information
• Coherence: Make it logical

Mindsets, Tactics, and Tools for Revising

When revising, a few mindsets, tactics, and tools can make the process more effective and efficient.

🧠 Mindsets

• Pretend someone else wrote your draft and read it as a reader instead of its writer.
• Do not get emotionally attached to your words.

🛠 Tactics and Tools

• Use Reverse Outlining to analyse the structure of your draft.
• Highlight key topics in each sentence and paragraph to see if you are repeating yourself.
• Create a document to store any text you remove from your primary draft. This allows you to save text for future writing. Doing this can also make removing text from the primary draft easier because it doesn't feel like your words are being completely lost.
• Take a break between completing your draft and starting your revisions.
• Change how the document looks so that you can trick your brain into thinking it's an unfamiliar document. For example, try changing the font type, size, spacing, or colour.
• Give revising your complete focus by working somewhere quiet and free from distractions.
• Revise in short blocks so that you can maintain deep focus. Your concentration will naturally reduce over time, and trying to revise for extended periods will mean that your ability to identify issues will become less effective.

Revising for Your Audience

As you are revising to ensure that your writing achieves it's purpose, you might realize you need to make some changes in order to better tailor your writing to your audience.

📖 Read the following chapter on how to revise for your audience

The key points from the chapter are:

- Add information readers need to understand your document
- Omit information your readers do not need
- Change the level of the information you currently have
- Add examples to help readers understand
- Change the level of your examples

- Change the organization of your information
- Strengthen transitions
- Write stronger introductions—both for the whole document and for major sections
- Create topic sentences for paragraphs and paragraph groups

- Change sentence style and length
- Edit for sentence clarity and economy

- Add and vary graphics
- Break text up or consolidate text into meaningful, usable chunks
- Add cross-references to important information
- Use headings and lists
- Use special typography, and work with margins, line length, line spacing, type size, and type style

Check Your Understanding

❓ Read the two versions of the email below and answer the questions in the padlet.

References

Pinker, S. (2014). The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. New York, NY: Penguin.

Purdue Online Writing Lab, Revising for Coherence.

Smith, Jordan. Communication @ Work. eCampus Ontario

The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Editing and Proofreading