Everyday Canvas

Revision Benefits Our Writing

Prompt: What do you make of the advice for fiction that says, “Revise, revise, revise”? Could too much revision kill the original spark, and what is your advice concerning revision?

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Revision helps us to become better and more efficient writers. Through the revision process, we learn not to make the syntax, grammar, and other compositional errors.

Although it is certainly possible to kill the original idea or spark in a piece with extensive revision, we may be able to avoid such a mishap by paying attention to the process and gaining experience in revising our work.

Revisions are important, and there exist many different kinds of fixing a text. Of what I can think and recall at the moment, those are:

• On a smaller scale, when we think some part of the piece is not working, we pay attention to that piece and how it relates to the overall composition.

• On the larger scale, we look for everything and anything that seems or feels off. If we find too much of what has gone awry, then we may re-write or re-structure the entire piece.

• Editing is important, too, but simple edits are not considered revisions. Editing is fixing maybe the structure of a sentence or correcting typos and misspellings or cutting and pasting different parts of the paragraph to give it a better readability.

• Proofreading is another more advanced form of editing and is usually done after all revisions and edits are finished. It means using a spellchecker or fixing errors When we proofread, it helps if we read the text aloud to hear how the writing sounds.

One of the most important aspects of being a writer is developing our objectivity. After all, no parent likes to see the negatives in their offspring, but then, good parents do. This kind of objectivity comes in time and after we gain enough experience, but the idea is letting go of our love or pride for our own work and trying to see it through a reader’s eyes as clearly as we can.

Some of the questions we can ask ourselves during the process of revision can be:

• Did I put on the paper or the screen what I intended to say?
• Is the language, viewpoint, tone, and voice proper for this work?
• What are the weaknesses of this piece?
• What are the strengths?
• Is the structure of the piece is so that the reader is not confused as to who, what, where, and when?
• Is each point relevant and, if it is fiction, is each event or scene part of the unified whole?
• Does every part of the text relate well to the general theme? Or are there any logical fallacies?

It is a good idea to get other people’s (beta readers’) opinions, also, before posting it for everyone else or submitting it to a publication, but those people should be ones who are experienced in good writing, so their advice can help our work.