1. The opportunity to revise
“All writing that is any good is experimental: that is, it’s a way of seeing what is possible.” –Robert Penn Warren

2. The first draft as the “discovery draft”
At the beginning, your paper might feel like a lump of clay. You might not know yet what your paper will turn into or what you want to say.

3. Toward a final draft
The goal for the final draft is to give your paper a clear form, which you accomplish through revision.

4. Defining “Revision” Revision as re-writing (not editing)
Revision as re-vision
Revision as a process of discovering meaning
“I write in order to understand as much as to be understood.” –Elie Wiesel
“Invent a jungle and then explore it.” –Tony Connor
“You don’t know what’s going to happen. Nobody does.” – William Stafford
The terror of the unknown

5. Internal versus external revision
Internal revision includes “everything writers do to discover and develop what they have to say, beginning with the reading of a completed first draft. They read to discover where their content, form, language, and voice have led them…The audience is one person: the writer.” - Murray

6. Internal versus External revision
External revision is “what writers do to communicate what they have found to another audience…They eye their audience and may choose to appeal to it. They read as an outsider.” – Murray

7. Linear versus recursive revision
Linear revision:
Writing improves steadily over time
THE writing process that we learned in school

8. Linear versus recursive revision
Writing improves by going back and forth between drafts
Messy and indirect

9. Linear versus recursive continued
More on recursive revision:
“[Writers] move from a revision of the entire piece down to the page, the paragraph, the sentence, the line, the phrase, the word. And then, because each word may give off an explosion of meaning, they move out from the word to the phrase, the line, the sentence, the paragraph, the page, the piece. Again and again and again” (Murray 82).
When you write, “you start walking in circles. The larger the circle, the more truth you can get. The wider the horizon, the more you walk, the more you linger in everything, the better chance you have of finding particles of truth” (Allende).

10. Global and local revision
Global revision involves looking at the “big picture” and making significant changes to a text. These changes may include organization, development, etc.

11. Global and local revision
Local revision involves making smaller and more specific changes to a text, such as word choice, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, and tone.