Name:____________________________Date:______________Block:___________ 

Ms. Franklin English IV 

Revision occurs after you have a complete piece, although revisions occurs at all stages. 

Match what you have already written with what you now wish to say.  

Create out of the two a new piece that suits their present purpose 

Revision never stops 

 The First Draft: Reseeing or Rethinking: changing what a piece says, the paper’s “bones.” 

• You may realize it doesn’t say what you want it to say.  
• You may crumple up what you’ve written and want to throw it away (actually keep in your portfolio but you don’t have to use it)  

 The Second Draft: Reworking or reshaping: changing how a piece says it, or changing the paper’s “muscles” 

• You are satisfied with what you are saying, but not with how you said it.  
• Working on “how” tends to mean thinking about readers: thinking about how your thoughts will be read or understood by people other than yourself. 
• Feedback from readers is very useful at this level. 
• One of the most common kinds of reworking is to improve clarity—clarifying sentences or transitions or whole paragraphs or changing the order of things, adding an introduction or conclusions and some transitions or getting rid of ideas or suggestions that seem unnecessary now.  
• You may need to leave out parts that you like but that just don’t belong anymore.  

 The Third Draft: Copyediting or proofreading for mechanics and usage: checking for deviations from standard conventions, or changing the paper’s “skin.” 

• This is what you do right before you hand something in.  
• At the least, it is finding typographical errors. 

You probably need to do these three levels in this order.  

**borrowed from Elbow and Belanoff’s Being a Writer 

**Natalie Goldberg makes a similar reference to in Writing Down the Bones.