Revisions

Slide 1 What are Revisions

• They are not just checking your work for grammar and spelling mistakes.

• Revisions are exactly what they sound like:

• You have an original vision, and manifest it in a piece of work.

• You then give your brain time to process it, to work through your ideas, to draw more out of them.

• This allow you to make the implicit explicit.

• At this stage you need to really trust your instincts, even if your instincts say you need to rewrite the whole thing. This is because even if you didn’t want to, you have already moved on from your original topic, and the only way to produce the best work, is to not fight where you naturally want to go with the work.

• So now you have a Re-Vision, a second or third vision about where you want your work to go.

• It’s like putting in golf, your first shot gets you in the general direction of the hole, your second might sink, but if it doesn’t it will get you closer to the hole.

Slide 2 Scoping the Green

• Revisions are always at work, even when you first write your paper. There is no line that says “Ok, first draft done, now lets do revisions.” Revisions start before you even begin your paper, when you are brainstorming.

• So the best way to get a really good first shot, is to metaphorically scoping the green.

• To do this, you should engage in a practice that one of my professors calls “Throwing shit at the wall and see what sticks”, this simply means, writing without a filter. To do this, you simply write at your computer or on a piece of paper, and just excrete whatever comes to your mind. Don’t worry about grammar, spelling, or even logic; remember, what your doing is a legitimate writing style.

• When do you know you have flung enough of your mental excrement at you paper or computer screen? Well, it is a lot like taking a shit on the toilet. You will probably get a large quantity at first, but you may need to work for it. Maybe it will all come out at once, and you’ll be done. Or maybe there will be stragglers and you will be at it for awhile and still have quality shit. The point is, you’ll know when your done, you will feel like you have nothing left to give.

Slide 3 second shot

• We skipped talking about your outline and first shot, because that is not, strictly speaking, revision.

• So you have your first shot, and maybe it was a decent one if you took some time to scope the green. Now what?

• Now you take your second one stupid.

• To repeat, your second shot should not just be grammatically correcting the first, maybe you overshot the hole, maybe you undershot it, maybe you ran into a bump you didn’t see, and your paper went to the right or left. Now that you have had time to process your paper and see some mistakes and places you could improve, take a second shot.

• Don’t feel any qualms about completely erasing things, just leaving things in just to get some space filled up isnt going to help anybody. Not only is it going to provide you with an unsatisfying paper, but there is a deeper problem that it causes.

• Your in college now for the first time in your life. College is training. Your allowed to mess up here. If your stressed by the fact that you need to write a 20 page paper, now is the time to get unstressed about it. If you are just writing anything to take up space, work that is unoriginal, unthoughtful, and unhelpful, you will always write like that. Now is the time to try and develop your writing, so you should try and make into interesting, or you will learn to write poorly. You should learn to enjoy writing.

• Remember, you never get the ball in the whole, there is always something you can rework to make it better

Slide 4 example

• I used this method when I did my plan outline for our third project. I started out with planning to conduct lectures around Denver, but I slowly tweaked it and tweaked it until it came out as something different. In the end, I decided to come up with a plan for a sustainable farm in Colorado.

Slide 5 assignment

• Your assignment for next class is to take a piece of writing, done by someone else, that you really like, and revise it. You could even change the main point of the writing, as long as it makes sense, is original, and can be viewed as an improvement on the original piece.