1. Revision: Re-seeing, Re-thinking

2. Revising
“The more natural a piece of writing seems, the more effort the writer has probably put into revising. Revising is so important that some writers say that writing is revising; they reinforce the point by calling their first drafts ‘zero drafts’.” --Ebest et al. Writing from A to Z, p

3. Reader-based writing is about how we say what we say
Reader-based writing is about how we say what we say. It is here that we revise, edit and proofread in order to get the text to mean what we want it to mean in the minds of our readers.
However, revising and editing and proofreading are two different things.
Revising is concerned with structure and the coherence and effectiveness of the argument.
For writers that draft early and often, revising could be an opportunity to re-focus the argument if he or she found a point of contention that was even more interesting than the original.
Reader-based Writing

4. Good writers have a revision strategy
Good writers have a revision strategy. One such strategy is that they focus on large-scale, global issues before moving on to smaller-scale local concerns.
Generally, global concerns would be concerns about the integrity and validity of the argument and how sections and paragraphs serve to further the argument.
Lower-scale revision concerns include issues internal to the paragraph: how sentences function inform the paragraph’s central idea and whether there is a clear transition into the next paragraph.
Revising Strategies

5. Global concerns Does the draft address the assignment?
Is there a clearly stated research question, claim, problem or hypothesis and is its relevance expounded upon?
What is the structure of the argument?
(Suggestion: outline the argument, the claims, backing and warrants that make the case. Does this outline consistent with how the text has structured the argument?)
How do headings carry the argument forward?
What is the contribution of each paragraph to the case being made?
Global concerns
A good, quick, easy, but informative, exercise on outlining can be found here:

6. Are paragraphs unified. What is the paragraph about
Are paragraphs unified? What is the paragraph about? And what controls the conversation in the paragraph?
Does each sentence contribute to the topic of the paragraph?
Is the veracity of claims made in the paragraph backed up and supported with examples?
Are the relationships between the ideas expressed in the paragraph well signalled with words like ‘and’, ‘for’, ‘so’ or ‘therefore’, ‘moreover’, ‘however’ or ‘firstly’, ‘next’, ‘finally’?
Is the reader able to anticipate the topic in the next paragraph as a result of a well-crafted transition sentence?
Local Concerns
Paragraphs address one topic. If ‘Gold, a precious metal, is valued for two important properties’ was a paragraph’s topic sentence, then I would know that the topic of the paragraph was ‘gold’ and that ‘two important properties’ is the controlling idea. I am not going to talk about one or three or seven important properties, but two. I might proceed by naming one of those properties, then saying a bit about it. Afterwards, I might move onto the other quality, saying a bit about that. A transition into the next paragraph might be to suggest that there is another property for which industry has recently found a great deal of value. One would assume that I am going to talk about that property in my next paragraph.
It might be good to ask students to divide a long text without paragraphs into paragraphs. UEfAP.com has a good exercise at Othewise, a tutor might take an academic text and undo the paragraphs to see if students can reestablish where the paragraphs boundaries once were.

7. Moving on…
Once the writer is content that his or her argument is well-made and well-organised, he or she can move on to editing for clarity, precision and concision, checking spelling, grammar and mechanics.