A Lesson in Revision

There's an old adage that "rejection is nature's way of telling you to write better."  Even more true is the writer's mantra, "writing is revision."

I couldn't help but think of the truth of that mantra when Vanity Fair published photos of the text of Sarah Palin's resignation speech, after an executive literary editor, a fact-checker from the research department, and a copy-editor have all gone over the pages, each making color-coded changes penciled onto the double-spaced lines of text, according to their individual editorial departments.

A single page of Palin's speech. Entire text is on the linked Vanity Fair site.

Now, don't feel like Vanity Fair is just picking on Sarah Palin, because they aren't. Neither am I. The picture made me laugh, though, because that's what my own pages look like, while I'm revising.

If you look at the actual text on those pages before Vanity Fair's editorial staff went to work on the piece? It's not publishable. It's just barely intelligible, for that matter.  In short, it reads like a raw first draft.

Now, there's nothing wrong with a first draft. Every piece of writing begins life in a state of first draft. While it's true that some writers manage to produce much cleaner copy than others, even first draft copy, it's not a skill anyone is actually born with. Writing extremely clean first-draft copy is a skill acquired by years of practice, critical reading and thinking, and careful word-crafting. And the truth of the matter is, no matter how clean you think your draft is, you'll only improve it with competent and careful revision.

Part of learning to revise is, first, learning to see what's wrong, as well as  learning to read what you've actually written, rather than what you think you've written.  There are a variety of techniques you can use to learn to edit more effectively, but here are a few places for you to begin:

• Check your spelling.
  Even if you're sure you spelled an unfamiliar word correctly, check it. Check it with more than one source. Make sure you're using the appropriate spelling for the region in which the preponderance of your audience is likely to be living; that is, if you're writing a piece primarily for Americans don't use British or Canadian spelling quirks, and vice versa.
• Beware of homophones.
  There, their, and they're aren't the same words, and a spell checker won't tell you that you used the wrong word.
• Print the pages out, and edit on hard copy.
  Format your pages with 1" margins, double-spaced, so you have plenty of room to make notes and pencil changes into the text.
• For your second pass, reformat the text.
  Seriously, put the whole piece into a different font, perhaps even into columns. The point of this is to trick your eye into seeing the words that are actually on the page, rather than what your brain expects to see on the page.
• Read your writing out loud.
  Awkward constructions, confusing sentences, tangled metaphors, and subject/verb infelicities can sometimes be easier to hear than to see on the page. If you find parts of a piece of writing difficult and confusing to read aloud, they're likely difficult and confusing for your reader, as well.

Mostly, never stop looking for ways to improve: The only writers who aren't hard on themselves are amateurs.