Why is revising a paper important

Another helpful strategy is to read your essay in reverse, starting with your last sentence and going from there. This takes away the flow as you read your essay, will slow you down, and can give you an opportunity to see each sentence on its own. Write Read Educators. Forgot your password?

Lost your password? Please enter your email address. Here are several things to do. Instead, focus on two or three main areas during each revision session:. You may want to start working on your next paper early so that you have plenty of time for revising. Sometimes it means coming up with stronger arguments to defend your position, or coming up with more vivid examples to illustrate your points.

Sometimes it means shifting the order of your paper to help the reader follow your argument, or to change the emphasis of your points. Sometimes it means adding or deleting material for balance or emphasis.

And then, sadly, sometimes revision does mean trashing your first draft and starting from scratch. Better that than having the teacher trash your final paper. As writers, we often produce lots of material that needs to be tossed. The idea or metaphor or paragraph that I think is most wonderful and brilliant is often the very thing that confuses my reader or ruins the tone of my piece or interrupts the flow of my argument.

Writers must be willing to sacrifice their favorite bits of writing for the good of the piece as a whole. In order to trim things down, though, you first have to have plenty of material on the page.

One trick is not to hinder yourself while you are composing the first draft because the more you produce, the more you will have to work with when cutting time comes. Sometimes you write something and then tinker with it before moving on. But be warned: there are two potential problems with revising as you go. One is that if you revise only as you go along, you never get to think of the big picture.

Another danger to revising as you go is that you may short-circuit your creativity. Revision is more than proofreading. It is looking back at whole ideas to make sure that everything fits the purpose of the document. It may be looking back at the type of or amount of evidence provided to support the ideas, or it may be looking back at the organization of paragraphs and their relation to one another.

In other words, it is expected that a document go through multiple drafts instead of being written once.

In fact, experienced writers often say that the majority of their time is spent rewriting, reorganizing, and rewording their first draft.

Writing is also often very personal. Once something is placed on the page, it can be difficult to decide to delete it. True revision, however, may require deletion. Are there unclear or confusing ideas or sentences? Read your paper out loud and listen for awkward pauses and unclear ideas. Cut out extra words, vagueness, and misused words. Visit the Purdue OWL's vidcast on cutting during the revision phase for more help with this task.

Do you see any problems with grammar, punctuation, or spelling? If you think something is wrong, you should make a note of it, even if you don't know how to fix it.

You can always talk to a Writing Lab tutor about how to correct errors. Try to detach yourself from what you've written; pretend that you are reviewing someone else's work. What would you say is the most successful part of your paper?