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. 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. THE FIRST DRAFT AS THE “DISCOVERY DRAFT”

3. The goal for the final draft is to give your paper a clearer form, which you accomplish through revision. TOWARD A FINAL DRAFT

4. DEFINING “REVISION” Revision as re-writing, multi-drafts 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. They use language, structure, and information to find out what they have to say or hope to say. 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, and it is significant that such terms as ‘polish’ are used by professionals: they dramatize the fact that the writer at this stage in the process may, appropriately, be concerned with exterior appearance.” – Murray

7. Linear revision: Writing improves steadily over time THE writing process that we learned in school THE writing process LINEAR VERSUS RECURSIVE REVISION

8. Recursive revision: Writing improves by going back and forth between drafts Messy and indirect LINEAR VERSUS RECURSIVE REVISION

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 organizing your thoughts, developing your ideas, and discovering meaning.

11. Local revision involves making smaller and more specific changes to a text, including word choice, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, tone, and tension. GLOBAL AND LOCAL REVISION