Re·reading and Re·vision { spring 2005 }
Of the many types of writing I do in my life, most require revision of some sort. Very rarely are my first drafts sufficiently clear and well-written to serve their purpose, especially if that purpose is large or complex, or if the writing is long and composed of many parts, as most serious writing tends to be. Rereading and revision are indispensable parts of any writing project; without them it would be hard to write at all. If “to reread and to revise both mean to ‘re-see’ a text,” then to read and to write must have something to do with seeing that text for the first time, watching it take shape under our pen or cursor, feeling its purpose shift and settle through draft after draft.
As I thought about the different meanings we give to the word ‘reading,’ I complicated the process of writing this essay by thinking about how ‘rereading’ means more than simply going over the words I had written already. I decided that reviewing my notes and outlines, reviewing my memories, and even viewing my thoughts in a new form (as words vs. as ideas) could be considered forms of rereading. Obviously some of these interpretations are more literal than others. However, I found thinking about rereading on more than one level very interesting and I tried to reflect those thoughts in this paper. Reading and rereading are involved in my writing on several levels, beginning with the earliest inspirations for a writing project and continuing on even after the final proofreading.
Observing my writing, rereading, and revision processes has been tricky. Not only do I distract myself by dividing my attention between what I am writing and how I am writing it, but I also disrupt the process rather horribly with my scrutiny. As I go about pruning this draft and improving its clarity and focus, I feel constantly torn between continuing to revise and stopping to take note of how I am revising, where my eyes are moving, what type of revision I am doing and why. I stopped and added these few sentences (beginning from “As I go about…”) on the end of this paragraph in place of one sentence I thought sounded stupid. I deleted the whole stupid-sounding thing remorselessly and have now doubled the length of the paragraph describing this example of my revision process. Why? I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps I felt the paragraph needed to be longer. I am now rereading this section wondering if I can justify its presence. Does it really fit? Oh, I see I’ve left an ‘e’ off the end of ‘note.’ There. Fixed.
The reasons behind my rereading my writing at all vary, from the most basic proofreading to the most serious re-establishment of my place in the slow progression of a long-dormant piece of writing. But the largest, most obvious reason I reread as I write is because it is an automatic process. The principle of automaticity proves that people cannot help reading when there are words present to be read. Wherever my eyes fall on a page of text, I read at least a few words, even if I do not consciously internalize the meaning behind those words.
As we discussed in class at the beginning of the semester, there are multiple layers and implications behind the word ‘reading’—we use it to describe almost any activity which involves translating symbols (be they literary, numeric, pictorial, or natural) into meaning. Reading implies making connections, which is what much of our human experience consists of.* Writing, for me, is a part of that learning process just as much as reading is—that power over words is something that allows me to define my life in my own words and claim my experience as mine, in spite of how much I really am influenced by others.
Composition, for me, takes place primarily in my head before anything gets recorded on paper. Before I write anything, I must first think to write it—the idea must pass through my brain in some fashion. I do not presume to know where ideas come from, except to say that they seem to be spawned by a mixture of our experiences and our imaginations. It would be overly simplistic to say that we ‘read’ our ideas from the world around us. However, our thoughts, and therefore the things we write, are influenced by and connected to our experiences.
Memory plays a large role in my writing. I use it to keep track of the various threads of my composition while I am in the process of recording it in more tangible form. Even when I do happen to be equipped with writing utensils, I often get distracted and forget all the ideas I was thinking a moment before. In cases such as these, and in cases where I lack the props necessary for recording my thoughts in tangible form, I depend on my memory. Memory, when it functions properly, provides my mind with one way of rereading the very first drafts of my ideas. Before they are written down outside of my head, my ideas must be read and sometimes reread (or re-remembered) from my memory.
Once a workable draft has been put together, rereading is inevitable and revision necessary. I reread in different ways depending on what specific goals I have in mind and how much discipline I have in sticking to those goals. As I mentioned, rereading is automatic; revision, however, is not. Revision takes planning and determination. It is hard work, and often takes much longer than you think it will. I tend to procrastinate dreadfully.
Much of my revision is mental revision—working out in my head how I want to say things, asking myself how I can justify the points I am making, and strengthening my own resolve to make them as well as possible. Usually I tend to hash out the more general elements of my essay first—its main thesis, its structure and progression, and then its individual paragraphs and sentences. I find that the words fall into place more easily this way, once I have a plan to follow. This probably isn’t true, since half the time I re-write my outlines several times even after I’ve spun out a messy rough draft or two. In reality I probably write both from the top down and from the bottom up, using each approach to simultaneously strengthen the other until the piece evens out and holds just the right amount of information.
Rereading drafts is only part of the work of composition and revising. I also read and reread from outside sources when I am working on a piece of writing. Depending on the project at hand, I will either have notes previously taken down on paper or at least the idea of a direction in my mind or provided by an assignment. For this paper, I found myself rereading the assignment description several times to get a better understanding of why I was writing it. I also made use of the outlines I had written to help track and evaluate my writing progress. I write and rewrite outlines at several different points throughout my revision, reevaluating everything I write as I am working, sometimes changing my approach if it has gone off track.
Going off track is a frequent problem with me. Despite my numerous outlines and constant reinforcement of my writing objectives through rereading and reanalyzing my purpose, when I put words on paper I do so in a very disorganized way. I write in chunks, often distracted by another thought, a pain in my hand, somebody talking to me, or (particularly with this essay) an observation about how I am revising as I work. I move from rereading my notes to redrafting yet another outline to trying to develop a completely different idea, from there to trying to rework my opening sentence or scratch out the redundant phrases in my thesis statement. Even when I am able to accumulate words enough to fill a whole page or two all at the same time, the thoughts expressed there are often disconnected. Most often my writings appear in sections of four to six lines. Later revisions will strive to somehow unify these random chunks—if not, the irreconcilable parts must be left out.
The reasons for this disconnected writing primarily have to do with my easily distracted brain, but also stem from my need to reinforce separate ideas and understand them through my expression of them. In writing things out, sometimes again and again and again in different forms, I increase my understanding of them. Thus, rewriting is a kind of rereading for me, a review of my subject matter. When I rewrite like this I don’t usually reread much of my previously written text, but I am still “re-seeing” that text in a different way, shaping it as I go.
Because I write in such a disorderly fashion, I often confuse my drafts with needless repetition, scrambled paragraph structure, superfluous punctuation and a lack of adequate transitioning. Naturally these problems are the ones my later revision focuses on fixing. Transitioning is an especially big concern of mine. I tend to move things around constantly. What was once the third paragraph of this paper is now its introduction. A few moments ago this paragraph here was located just after the paragraph it now precedes. I almost deleted it entirely but realized it would fit nicely up here with the rest of my comments on (and here I am going back to reread the previous half-page and remember what those comments did concern…) my disorganized drafts.
Revision is a constant, unstoppable habit of mine and it takes place in almost as disorderly a fashion as the drafting process itself. As I compose sentences I often think of a better word or an alternate phrasing and scribble it into the space between lines or enter it in brackets while I’m typing, keeping it as an alternative (I like to keep my options open in early drafts). If any horrible repetitiveness or clumsy phrasing comes to my attention while I work, I usually change it right then before I forget. During early drafts I usually hesitate to permanently delete any very substantial chunks of prose, finding it safer to keep most parts even if I must remove them from the body of the text for the time being. Still, I find I am more deliberate when I am writing on the computer, more apt to delete words and replace them, insert phrases and sentences wherever I need to, rearrange sentences and paragraphs, and cut and paste entire sections out of the body of the text, removing them temporarily from my work. As I type a draft from handwritten notes I add things and change things without much thought, relying on my gut instincts to tell me what sounds clearest and best. For example, I just replaced the word ‘depending’ with ‘relying’ in the previous sentence. It sounded much more appropriate, to me.
Reading and understanding involve making connections. Logically, re-reading would mean reinforcing those connections. Whenever I reread my own writing as I revise it, this is what I am doing, but with the intent of evaluating and testing those connections. I must ask myself as I reread, does this really make sense? Are these statements valid? Do these sentences fit together well enough? Do the ideas represented here appear strong enough, well enough defined, and clear enough? Will another reader be able to follow? These questions are part of distancing myself from my writing, which is something difficult for me but very necessary to the revision process.
The goals I have in mind as I do major revisions mainly have to do with focus, clarity, organization and structure. These are the things I want to get straightened out earliest in my drafting process. I figure that once I have a structure set out I will be able to easily follow it and the necessary words will fall into place. I usually reread my outline to remind myself of the structure I originally had in mind, and sometimes will re-write it several times in different ways, experimenting with organization and overall emphasis.
After my writing project has been sufficiently organized, I let it sit for a while before I come back to proofread it again. Even after a few days have passed, I still find it hard to be objective, but I make what improvements I can. I have just finished going over this paper once and I noticed that my changes were for the most part small. The torn feeling I had a few days ago about trying to watch myself trying to write and revise has abated. Mostly I changed less appropriate words to better ones or deleted unnecessary words, sometimes added a few transitional sentences where I felt they were needed. Transitions, as I mentioned, are one of my biggest concerns in my essays, so I focus on them throughout my revision process, but especially near the end when the paragraphs have been settled into their final places and the connections between them are not in danger of being twisted or broken again.
I knew last night, when I decided I was close enough to being finished that I could leave this paper alone for a while, that I still needed a conclusion. All morning I have thought about how best to end this piece. I wonder how I will know when it has said everything it needs to have said? There are several details I could have mentioned but decided to leave up to my reader’s imagination. There are also probably several things I failed to notice about my revision habits and therefore did not mention. I want it to be able to reread this paper and not feel like I need to change anything. That’s an odd goal, considering I just admitted that this paper has its imperfections. I guess I realize that while I could easily revise this paper forever, there comes a point (after the proofreading, when you find yourself taking out an adjective or a comma you just put in the last time you reread that section) where you have to say, there. Finished.
* Here is one place where I had to stop writing and ask myself SO WHAT?? I ask myself ‘so what?’ quite often when I am writing essays, and I type it in all capitals so I will notice that the question is there, begging to be answered. Asking ‘so what?’ is a habit I picked up from my Advanced Composition teacher in high school. Whenever I forget why I am typing the words I am typing, or I don’t know where to go next, I type SO WHAT?? and remember to come back later and figure out what my point is. The sentence following the asterisk of this footnote is my answer to that so what question.
