follow the steps below: Read the section titled Quick Tip: The Quickest Revision Strategy located in Chapter 17: Revising Style: Telling Your Story Clearly of your textbook (p. 101).Using the steps ou
Chapter 17: Revising Style: Telling Your Story Clearly
Quick Tip: The Quickest Revision Strategy
Our advice about revision may seem overly detailed, but if you revise in steps, it’s not difficult to follow. The first step is the most important: as you draft, remember to forget these steps (except for this one about remembering). Your first job is to draft something to revise. You will never do that if you keep asking yourself whether you should have just used a verb or a noun. If you don’t have time to look at every sentence, start with passages where you found it hard to explain your ideas. When you struggle to write about confusing content, your sentences tend toward confusion as well.
For Clarity and Flow
To diagnose:
1. Highlight the first six or seven words in every sentence. Ignore short introductory phrases such as At first, For the most part, and so on.
2. Run your eye down the page, checking whether you highlighted a consistent set of related words. The words that begin a series of sentences need not be identical, but they should name people or concepts that your readers will see are clearly related. If not, revise.
3. Check the highlighted words in each sentence. They should include a subject that names a character and a verb that names an important action. If not, revise.
To revise:
1. Identify your main characters, real or conceptual. Make them the subjects of verbs.
2. Look for nouns ending in -tion, -ment, -ence, and so on. If they are the subjects of verbs, turn them into verbs.
3. Make sure that each sentence begins with familiar information, preferably a character you have mentioned before.
For Emphasis
To diagnose:
1. Underline the last five or six words in every sentence.
2. You should have underlined
• technical-sounding words that you are using for the first time
• the newest, most complex information
• information that is most emphatic
• concepts that the next several sentences will develop
3. If you do not see that information there, revise: put those words last in the sentence.