64 Strategies for Analyzing and Revising a First Draft
Robin Jeffrey; Melissa Elston; and Christina Frasier
Learning Objectives
- Identify the differences between revising, editing, and proofreading
- Examine strategies for analyzing a draft for revision to ensure cohesion between the introduction and conclusion
- Examine strategies to catch sentence-level errors in drafts
What is the difference between revising, editing, and proofreading?
- Revising concerns organization, logic, and evidence.
- Editing focuses on grammar, punctuation, and spelling
- Proofreading focuses in on spelling and problems with format
Here are some steps for revising your essays in a reasonably objective way. These steps may seem formulaic and mechanical, but you need a way to diagnose your own prose so that you have some sense of how others will read it.
This first step is intended to ensure that the beginning and end of your paper cohere with each other, that they “frame” your paper is an appropriate way.
- Find the beginning and the end.
Draw a line after the end of your introduction and just before the beginning of your conclusion.
- Find candidates for your point.
Underline one sentence in both your introduction and conclusion that comes closest to expressing your main point, your claim, the thesis of your paper. In your introduction, that sentence is most likely to be the last one; in your conclusion, it might be anywhere.
- Find the best candidate.
Read the introduction and conclusion together, particularly comparing those two most important sentences. They should at least not contradict one another.
Example
- From an introduction:
During this unprecedented period, African-American artists shared in the process of creating a black urban identity through their depictions of a culture’s experience.
- From a conclusion:
While many were eager to slash the culture’s ties to its primitive history, Armstrong and Motley created art which included elements of the community’s history and which made this history a central part of African-American urban identity.
While many were eager to slash the culture’s ties to its primitive history, Armstrong and Motley created art which included elements of the community’s history and which made this history a central part of African-American urban identity.
It is likely that the sentence in your conclusion will be more specific, more substantive, more thoughtful than the one in your introduction. Your introduction may merely announce a general intention to write about some topic. If so, your conclusion is more likely to make a more important claim, generalization, or point about that topic. In the example above, the sentence from the introduction describes only the fairly general idea that artists contributed to a culture’s identity by depicting its experience. An important idea, certainly, but one that your readers probably already hold. An essay that did no more than reiterate it would not be especially valuable. Contrast the sentence from the conclusion. Here, the writer is more specific in several important ways. First, she is specific about one element in African-American experience: its ties to its primitive history. She is specific about what the artists did: they included aspects of that history in their art. She also adds the suggestive information that some people opposed including primitive history in African-American culture (“While many eager to slash the cultures ties . . . “). This controversy is potentially enriching for the essay because it may prompt the reader (and the writer) to analyze the subject from a very different perspective.
- Revise your introduction to match the best point.
If you find that the sentence from your conclusion is more insightful than the one from your introduction, then you have to revise your introduction to make it seem that you had this sentence in mind all along (even though when you started drafting the paper you may have had no idea how you were going to end it). You can do this in one of two ways:
- Insert at the end of your introduction some version of that sentence in your conclusion that comes closest to expressing your main point. You may have to revise the rest of the introduction to make it fit.
- If you don’t want to “give away” the point of your paper at the beginning, insert a sentence at the end of your introduction that at least anticipates your point by using some of its same language.
Example
As African-American artists such as Louis Armstrong and Archibald Motley, Jr. shared in the collective process of creating a black urban identity, they reflected their community’s struggle to define the role of historical experience in modern culture.
Note that this sentence does not conclude that Armstrong and Motley did include primitive history in their art. But it does introduce some implicit questions that anticipate that conclusion: did these artists use their historical experience? If so, how? Those implicit questions set up the explicit point.
Adapted from About Writing: A Guide by Robin Jeffrey, CC BY 4.0