Revision requires critical thinking. The usefulness of critical thinking has already been referred to in this book in relation to evaluating the sources you use when assembling your material. But it is usually much easier to subject another person's work to dispassionate analysis than to cast a cold critical eye on your own.The problem is that you know your own work too well. If it is a long piece that has required a good deal of research, you have quite likely lived with it for weeks if not months. You have struggled with it, slaved over it, put your all into it, and probably felt an enormous feeling of relief when you wrote or typed the final period. It may well seem to you to be full of good things. Even if you are aware that it is not entirely perfect, you may feel quite fond of it and proud of it. It is yours, after all. You may feel a natural reluctance to tamper with it. You may not even feel confident that if you attempt to change it, the results will be a genuine improvement.All these are natural feelings that almost every writer experiences. You simply have to be stern with yourself. Revision is a vital part of the process. It is also another creative process. There need be nothing mechanical about it. You will almost certainly have second thoughts that are better thoughts. You will have new ideas—or find new and better ways of expressing your existing ideas—that will give the whole piece a lift. Steel yourself and sit down to go back to your work.The first thing you need in order to be able to assess your work critically is to have some degree of distance from it. You need to come to it with fresh eyes. Ideally, when you come back to look at it again, you should regard it from the point of view of its intended reader or that of a disinterested outsider. It is quite difficult to do this by an effort of the imagination alone. By far the easiest way to achieve "distance" is to allow a period of time to pass between the completion of a draft and the beginning of revision. At least, leave the work overnight and come back to it fresh the next day. If possible, set it aside for a couple of days. Absence makes the head grow clearer. So, often, does a change of medium. This is why many writers prefer to edit on paper after they have written on screen. Printing out your work puts you in the position of a reader.The other obvious way to achieve distance is to pass the work to somebody else and ask that person to comment on it. It is not usually advisable to do this, however, until you have made at least one effort to revise the piece yourself, especially if it is a piece of any length. If your first draft is fairly rough, it is unfair to show it to anyone while it is still unfinished in every sense except the minimal one—that you have made it once through to the end. If the person you show your work to is the sort who loves to take other people in hand and show them the "proper" way to do things, he or she may relish the task—but may end up taking over your authorial role, at least in part. On the other hand, any other person who is not so inclined may feel put upon when he or she realizes that there is still a very long way to go before the piece is finished and that you are expecting him or her to do the groundwork for you. These factors are in addition to the general problem that unless the person is used to being asked to pass an opinion on written work, he or she may find it hard to know exactly what to say to be helpful. Many a writer has had a piece of work handed back by a "candid friend" with a "that seems perfectly fine to me" and not known whether this means that the piece is good and readable, or the person thinks it is really dull and awful but does not want to say so, or he or she is really at a loss to make any constructive comments and merely wants to be vaguely encouraging. If you know someone who is willing to be candid and knows enough to be able to offer specific comments and advice, that person's help can be invaluable. You cannot, however, always rely on even the most willing and literate friend having the time to help you. In the last analysis, this is a job that you have to be able to do for yourself. If you can get help, that is a bonus.It may also make things easier, especially if you have a fairly long draft to revise, to break the work of revision down into two separate phases. The first phase we might call large-scale revision. Here, you check the basic organization of the piece. You examine it for completeness and overall accuracy and ensure that the points follow one another in a logical sequence. You remove any material that seems to be superfluous, and you add anything that seems to be missing. The resultant reorganized text becomes your second draft. You then subject the second draft to the small-scale revision. In this second phase, you concentrate on matters of language and style. You check for grammatical accuracy, clarity of expression, and consistency in style. Again, you will add to and subtract from your text, but this time it is in order to improve the expression rather than the content.It is quite likely that when you are essentially looking to make large-scale changes, you will spot some small-scale matters that need attention. If they can be easily dealt with—that is to say, you know immediately how to put them right—make the necessary changes. If they seem to be more complicated, mark them in some way and come back to deal with them when you are concentrating on the smaller-scale issues.
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