Old-School Revision

Experienced writers know that the hardest part of writing isn't putting words on the page: it's revision. It's massaging and coaxing and wrestling and chiseling texts into the proper shape, the proper texture. I've been working on this article for a really, really long time. It's now in its 9th major revision, and it's 30 pages long, and last week, I realized that the bottom half of it needed some serious reorganizing. So I fell back on an old-school revision activity: the literal cut and paste.

It works like this. You take a printed copy of your paper (or in my case, thankfully, only half of it), and some scissors and glue, and you cut it into paragraphs. The glue is for pasting together the parts of paragraphs that span multiple pages. After your paper has been chopped into its component paragraphs, you mix them up and you find a large surface and you lay them out in your new order (this activity can be an interesting peer response technique too, if you let someone else rearrange them for you. Among other things, when somebody else tries to put your paper back together in the right order, you really start to get a sense of how important transitions are). Here's what my reassembled text-puzzle looked like:

Each column is a different subheading (though actually that first column contains two subheadings (one is transitional), and the remaining four are all sub-subheadings). The paragraphs with larger space between them are primarily transitional or meta-textual. The paragraphs on their sides didn't fit conceptually very well; that's my way of visually representing that they need to be heavily reworked or deleted (one of them was deleted, along with a bunch of bits of other paragraphs; the other three were reworked).

Using this method, I was able to get a birds-eye view or map of how my paper needed to be organized, which made my digital cutting & pasting much easier to manage. Of course I didn't exactly follow the map in the end. Reorganizing so many paragraphs required a lot of line-level revising too, and that in turn created alternate (and better, I think) organizational possibilities for the several paragraphs. It also gave me a better visual sense of how my sections were balanced than merely scrolling through a .doc could. And it offered me a fresh perspective on the text overall. After 9 revisions I was really having trouble seeing the trees for the forest; physically handling each paragraph individually was eye-opening.

I'm a proud tech nerd, but I have to admit that sometimes, low-tech solutions work better.

Now if only I could think of a better title, and a better conclusion for that beast.