The Revision Strategies Guide Courtesy of the GCWC.
People adjusting to the expectations of writing for college often find one thing in particular to be true: more and more time goes into revising their work. Revision Strategies is an online resource written by professional scholars of writing practices at the CUNY Graduate Center, containing a range of practical methods that can help you navigate the revision process more effectively.
Academic writing requires so much revision because these two competing factors are very difficult to reconcile. When a student first writes something, their goal is usually to capture for themselves the complexity of the thing they are talking about. This is an essential step for any writer to take to clarify their own thinking. However, the writing that results from this initial process tends to be constructed in a way that does not take the presumed reader’s needs into account. This is why it usually takes a great deal of revision to produce a final draft that conveys complex material that is also clear and easy for readers to follow.
The collection of revision strategies contained in this online resource is grouped into categories: Structure, Hierarchy, Argument, Evidence and Analysis, Key Terms, Orienting, Style, Tone, and Voice, and Clarity, Grammar, and Usage. Each of these categories represents an aspect of academic writing that you need to be thinking about during the revision process.