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1. Global Revision: Re-seeing and Re-thinking

To "re-vision" means to see with "new eyes." It implies reexamining everything, rethinking your entire argument, perhaps even your thesis or your topic. Give yourself time between drafts so you can see your work with new eyes. Ask others to bring their new eyes to your work. Great writers sometimes revise up to 50 times! They almost never get it "right" the first time, or finish a work before having someone else read it. You don't have to either!

After writing a draft, you may reread and realize that what you've written isn't what you want to say. Maybe you've changed your mind, or you've left something out, or the paper seems incomplete, or it simply doesn't fit the assignment adequately. Writing changes you--it changes your thinking. Your process of writing should bring up new ideas, discredit other ideas, and change your whole focus. You should expect to have to do at least some re-visioning.

Strategies for Re-thinking and Re-seeing

Share your ideas with others! Talk about your ideas with classmates or the instructor. Have one or many of them read your draft. Be sure to ask them specifically for the kind of feedback you want. Questions like "What do you see as my main idea?" and "Can you follow my argument?" will be helpful.

Constantly allow yourself a chance to add or modify ideas. Explore any ideas that enter your mind no matter how silly they may seem at first. Freewriting, listing, and talking are some of the ways to explore your ideas.

Reread your assignment. Are you fulfilling the goals set by your teacher? How about your own goals? Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is my main point? Does my paper support it?
• Is there a section that should be a separate piece of writing?
• Have I done too much and need to make my topic smaller, more direct?
• Is there enough here?
• Do I need to expand my arguments, examples, or explanations?
• Is each point supported by convincing evidence?

Act on the answers to these questions before moving on.

2. Organizational Revision: Re-shaping and Re-working

We look at organizing and reworking writing after exploring ideas so that we have as many ideas as possible to work with. Of course, this step may lead to new ideas you couldn't see before because the information wasn't connected in the same way. The exercise below, called a reverse outline, may be one of the most powerful tools you will ever use to reorganize and reshape your ideas. It's easy to use, and you will see results right away!

Go through your essay and number each paragraph. Next, take out a clean sheet of paper, and label one half "what it says" and the other half "what it does" (see example below). In a PHRASE or ONE BRIEF SENTENCE, sum up the topic (what it says) and the purpose (what it does) of each paragraph.

What it Says	What it Does
1. Thesis: cities use more water than they should, and will run out someday.	1. Introduces thesis
2. Portlanders use more water than most cities	2. Gives concrete example—water use.
3. Seattle people don't use as much water—they're more aware because of the ocean being there. Portland doesn't conserve in winter—only during "drought". Water-wasters not punished—should be. Dirty Rivers.	3. Compares to Seattle—valley vs. coast. Gives problems and solutions. Discusses consequences.
4. Portland rainfall, snowfall, and amount used per person. Why we should conserve. Why punish abusers. How to fix it. What will happen.	4. Gives source and use of Portland water. Gives reasons to conseerve. gives solutions and punishments. Gives solutions and consequences.

Now that you have and outline of your paper, you can easily look at the structure and ideas. If you can't give a brief sentence or phrase describing what a paragraph says or what it does, you might need to break it into more than one paragraph. If the same subject or purpose appears in many places, you may need to combine these into one strong paragraph or into a few connected paragraphs. After you reorganize, ask yourself these questions:

• Is information on each topic grouped together logically?
• Are the transitions between topics clear?
• Does each paragraph serve a purpose and strengthen my essay?
• Does each topic relate to my thesis, or do some need to go?
• Are there any "holes" where I need to add information?

Have someone else read your essay with you (or read it to them) and ask questions like:

• Is my argument clear?
• What points work best?
• Would you keep the points in the same order'?
• Does anything seem to be missing?

3. Editorial Revision: Refining and Rereading

These are the last steps in your re-"vision" process: the polish for your essay. Editing and proofreading address issues like grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc. Below are strategies many people use successfully. We suggest that you try them all. Eventually, you will want to develop your own editing/proofreading checklist.

As readers, our eyes (and minds) tend to race ahead of where we actually are in the text. We do this by relying on our expectations as readers and the more familiar we are with the text, the faster we read. This speed makes attention to detail very difficult. When we read our own work through to check it for mistakes, our eye often runs ahead, causing us to miss some mistakes, (e.g., slips like "form" in the place of "from," or extra/missing spaces). So what we want to do is employ some techniques for slowing our reading down, breaking our normal rhythm of reading.

Create Your Own Checklist

Identify each problem you see repeatedly in your papers, and add it to your personal editing checklist. Use this checklist with each assignment by reading through your paper focusing on one item at a time.

Catching Syntax and Editing Errors

Read your paper aloud to a friend and have them make a mark anytime what you read is not exactly what you've written. You will probably correct many of your errors (like where you leave a word out, or use a different word than you meant) as you read because you know what you meant. If you prefer, read to a tape recorder, then listen and mark for yourself. Use the marks to compare what is written and what you meant. Choose what should really be written.

Have someone read your paper aloud to you. Ask the reader to read the exact words on the page, typos and all. Mark any place where what they read is not what you meant. Use the marks to compare what is written and what you meant. Choose what should really be written.

Read your paper out loud while placing a sheet of paper or a ruler under the line you are reading. This will help you to focus on one line at a time, and will force you to slow down and see what's there, instead of what you THINK is there.

Catching Grammar Errors

Read the last sentence of your paper first and work backward through your paper one sentence at a time. This helps separate the sentence from the context and makes it easier to see if it stands on its own grammatically.

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