The revision process is one of the most important things for new writers to learn. In Doug Downs piece “Revision Is Central to Developing Writing,” he explains how writers should be interactive with their writing, constantly changing and adapting their work as new ideas come to them. He brings up the points that revision is a necessary process in writing because first drafts only get the central ideas down and we are meant to use revision to add ideas that make the reader think. He backs this idea by telling how revision requires us to use language which not only represents someone’s existing ideas but also to generate new ones that weren’t previously thought of.
Downs explains something very important to new writers to know which is
“writers usually find something to say that they didn’t have to say before writing”.
I always assumed that I was a bad writer so this is something that I wish I would have learned as a new writer because I think it would have made starting a new topic less stressful. Failure was something I was always afraid of so thinking of revision in a different light might have helped me. This concept might confuse people though because people might wonder how to wright when you don’t know what you are writing about. Well the answer to that is research but because writing is a constant process of research, reflection, and documentation we are constantly finding our own meaning behind ours and other peoples experiences and words.
My favorite part of the article was the analogy about how writing is like driving a car in the dark. The idea is that like with headlights on a car when we are about to start a piece of writing we can only see a fraction of the way to the destination. Writing a first draft is like driving your car right up to the finish line and finding that there are some obstacle getting in the way. At this point you can see the the destination but you need to get out of the car assess the whole road and perhaps bring in you friends to hep you build a bridge or tear down an obstacle so that you can finish a race. In the revision process you are fixing miner mistakes as well as removing information that gets in the way of your point as well as reflecting on you writing to find new meaning.
sources:
4.4 Revision is central to developing writing (Mauder) – Threshold Resources (wordpress.com)
