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M. INCOFiPORATING RDEAS
Porter 4
Works Cited
Hsun Tzu. "Man's Nature Is Evil." Reading the World: Ideas That Matter. 3rd ed. Ed. Michael Austin. New York: Norton, 2015. 84-92. Print.
Hucker, Charles O. China's Imperial Past: An Introduction to Chinese History and Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1975. Print.
Mencius. "Man's Nature Is Good." Reading the World: Ideas That Matter. 3rd ed. Ed. Michael Austin. New York: Norton, 2015. 78-82. Print.
Shun, Kwong Loi. "Mencius." 2004. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Web. 11 Feb. 2009.
Soles, David E. "The Nature and Grounds of Xunzi's Disagreement with Mencius." Asian Philosophy 9.2 (1999): 123-33. Print.
REVISING AND EDITING
W riting is not a product but a process—a draft can always be revised, reshaped, reformed, and improved. Once you've finished a draft of an essay, it's best to put it aside for a day or two and then approach it with a fresh eye—a "re-vision."
Revising a draft often means reimagining it from the ground up. During revision you'll want to rethink the basic ideas of your essay and rewrite the text as needed. You may revisit several stages of the writing process, perhaps doing more research, revising your thesis, and reorganizing your draft. Just as a renovated building often looks nothing like it did before renovations, it is not uncommon for writers to find that, after two or three revisions, almost nothing remains of the drafts that they started with.
Once you've completed rethinking and rewriting—a process you may go through several times—it's time to edit. This is the time to correct errors in spelling, punctuation, and grammar, and check for other mechanical issues.
In the following pages are guidelines and suggestions for the revision process— for rethinking, rewriting, and editing your essays.
RETHINKING
Give yourself plenty of time
Good writing takes time. You cannot create and revise multiple drafts the night before an essay is due. Your best essays will be the ones that you start well in advance of their due date and keep thinking about until they are done. This does not necessarily mean that you must spend more time on a paper than do those who procrastinate until the very end. Six hours spread over a week will almost always produce a better paper than six hours spent the night before it is due.
Ask other people to read your draft and provide feedback
The very act of writing suggests an audience, and, to be sure, your instructor will generally be the final audience for your efforts. But it is usually a good idea to get feedback on a draft during the revision process. A friend, a classmate, or a writing tutor can let you know if you have effectively translated your ideas into written words—and even if the ideas were worth translating in the first place.
Reread the assignment and make sure that you have followed it correctly
Good writing, as discussed in Chapter 10, meets the expectations of its audience. When the audience is a teacher who has given you an assignment, you must make absolutely certain that you have followed the instructions as closely as possible. Refer to the assignment guidelines when you have finished a draft and again when you're revising—just to make sure that, in the process of crafting your essay, you have not strayed away from the assignment or failed to answer a critical question asked by the instructor.
Identify your thesis and consider how each part of the essay supports it
It's not unusual to discover what you are trying to say while you are writing your first draft. If you find that, by the end of your draft, you're focusing on a different thesis from the one you started with, you'll want to revise your original thesis statement or revise other parts of your essay. In either case, make sure that your entire essay, all your evidence, develops and supports the same thesis—and make sure that that thesis is clearly indicated.
Don't be afraid to throw out ideas that don't work
One of the hardest things for any writer to do is to cut out words, sentences, or whole paragraphs that he or she has spent a substantial amount of time creating.
After we labor over a piece of writing, we feel an ownership of, and even a responsibility to, the words that we have brought into being. But nobody has good ideas all of the time, and even good ideas can be extraneous if they don't support the thesis. If you decide that an idea is not worth pursuing, or that it doesn't support or develop your thesis, you must be willing to cut it—even if it means scrapping the entire paper and starting over from scratch.
REWRITING
Make sure that your introduction and conclusion are consistent with each other
In the same way that ideas can drift away from the thesis during the course of writing a paper, conclusions can drift away from introductions. Use the revision process as an opportunity to revisit these two crucial paragraphs and make sure that they are working together. You might revise your introduction so that it anticipates your conclusion or revise your conclusion so that it refers to or extends your introduction—just make sure that the two paragraphs tie your essay together. This will encourage readers to view your essay as a self-contained, coherent argument.
Make sure that you have clear transitions between all major ideas
Transitions between ideas are an important part of orienting a reader to your paper (see p. 641). They can also be difficult to include in a first draft, since you are so often discovering ideas through the process of writing. You should therefore check the beginning and end of each paragraph and revise as needed to include transitions that move readers gracefully and seamlessly from one idea to the next.
Look for ways to eliminate useless words and phrases
It's easy to fall into the trap of using more words than are needed to convey an idea. But fewer words often mean clearer, more elegant prose. If you look carefully at your first draft, you will probably find it full of "deadwood": "there is" or "there are" at the beginnings of sentences; wordy constructions such as "because of the fact that"; and unnecessary additions and qualifications of all kinds. As you rewrite, look for ways to eliminate extra words that do not add meaning.
Pay attention to your ethos
As we discussed in Chapter 12, readers usually judge writers by the ethos (p. 663)— the overall persona—projected in a piece of writing. During the revision process, pay special attention to the ethos that you are projecting. This is the time to build rapport and establish credibility with your readers by striking the right tone and making sound arguments.
EDITING
Make sure that you have documented every source
As we saw in Chapter 14, the line between accidentally omitting documentation of a quotation and plagiarizing a paper is very thin. As you prepare your final draft for submission, make sure that you have properly documented every outside source that you used in any way.
Refer to a handbook or other source for grammar and usage questions
Many instructors require or recommend a handbook for composition courses. Handbooks contain a wealth of information about grammar rules, punctuation conventions, documentation styles, and other nuts-and-bolts elements of writing. If your instructor has chosen a specific handbook, use it faithfully. If not, select one in your library or bookstore and refer to it when revising your papers.