38 5. Critical Thinking

(Again, it may be wise to print out copies of these lectures)

One of the things you need to do, to be successful with your writing, is to effectively revise. As you know, I will be expecting a rough draft to accompany your final narrative essay (as well as for the others). When you look at your draft, you have to think objectively, from a different perspective. What would your reader think of what you just said? Would it be clear or confusing? Thorough or incomplete? You have to be hard on yourself when you revise.

Study the following notes that talk about revision and critical thinking. I hope they will help you in working on your rough drafts:

What is revision?

Revision is the process of analyzing original ideas to improve upon those ideas for the readers’ benefit.

• It requires you to think about what you have written from an unbiased, original perspective (that’s why you should place time between your rough draft and revision). You have to be able to ask questions about the effectiveness of your written words and to make some sometimes difficult decisions to change original info.

Revision guidelines

• Revision is used throughout the writing process, not in a brief editing session when a draft is completed.

• You edit you papers to fix structural problems like spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence sense and word choice.

• You proofreading your paper for errors and typos that may have been missed in other revision steps.

• Revision, however, is used continually to asses your paper from a “global perspective,” what kinds of major changes can you make, either in adding information, deleting information or moving information from one area to another.

• Even the best professional writers spend a great amount of time revising their work. An author may admit to rewriting a work dozens of times yet is still uncomfortable with the final result. Only an upcoming deadline will prevent the writer from continuing the revision process.