Reviews and Revisions

This section offers general advice for writing revisions; refer to the Essays section in this chapter for specific strategies on revising essays. In high school, the term first draft may have had a lackluster connotation to the quality of work you were expected to produce; however, at UCF a first draft is to be your best work. When you revise a paper that you put a lot of time and consideration into, the final product will be polished and clear. On the other hand, a first draft that was written in one sitting the day before it was due, will require a lot more work later to be polished and clear. Writing is a fluid activity, and your best work is shaped through critical thinking during the act of writing. If you are not an expert on writing about your chosen topic, your first draft will not be your best work because you are still formulating opinions and developing an understanding for the subject. Time management plays a major role in the revision process. As a student, you may be asked to write a revision based on an instructor critique, your own self-review, or a peer review. A study on revision habits and their outcomes conducted at the collegiate level showed that students who were asked to participate in a formal review process (i.e., outlining, summarizing, and critiquing for course credit) made revisions prior to handing in their first drafts; these students created a relatively polished first draft (Covill 219). A student with good time management skills should find drafting and revising to be a fairly easy task. The study determined that students with poor time management skills will put their best efforts into either the first draft or the final, but not both (Covill 221). Students who do not have great time management skills should begin their revision as soon as they receive their critique. If the worst thing a student can do when they receive a critique is not read it, then the second worst thing they can do is to not heed the recommended revisions. Oftentimes, the instructor will provide a list of corrections for mechanics and grammar and, they may also include suggestions in the form of marginal comments. For information on proofreading your drafts, see the proofreading section of Mechanics, Proofreading, and Punctuation. Marginal comments are suggestions but they should not be dismissed lightly. When your intended audience is recommending you make certain changes, the suggestions should not be disregarded or undervalued. Consider carefully and use your best judgment. Informal self-reviews are always a part of the revision process. A formal self-review will require a student to formally critique his own paper based on the rubric provided by the instructor. An informal self-review is an ongoing process that can occur at any time, and many times, during the process of writing and revising (Flower & Hayes 374). An informal self-review consists of revising your paper based on your own evaluation of its weaknesses. Students should plan for a couple of days between their first draft and beginning revisions. When revising your own paper, this break will help provide you with a fresh perspective on its content. A peer review differs from a peer evaluation because the review requires only a critique of the written work and not the person who wrote it. According to Covill, first drafts written for peer review were more developed than first drafts written for review by only the instructor.

From a professional standpoint, peer review is necessary to maintain the integrity of the academic journals the articles in question are submitted to. Miller explains the peer review process, individuals well versed in the appropriate research domain evaluate the quality of ideas, empirical rigor, and overall contribution conveyed by a manuscript (425). From an educational standpoint, peer reviews have two rhetorical purposes: to help your peer develop a better written work for his or her final submission and for the reviewers to learn for themselves what constitutes good and bad writing by analyzing each others work. By analyzing others work, students will learn to evaluate their own writing in a critical and detached way, on the basis of objective standards and criteria (Smith Broughton and Copely 46). Thus, giving them the tools they need to teach themselves how to write more effectively. Use the rubric or specific review strategies that your professor provides, otherwise, here is a helpful list of peer review questions adapted from The Wadsworth Handbook: What is the works greatest strength? What is the works greatest weakness? Does the work have a logical progression of ideas? What are the supporting ideas? How well do these details support the main idea? What could be elaborated on? What is irrelevant? Is there anything from your own research or experience that would be helpful to the writer? Are the ideas clear the way they are presented in the paper, or do they need to be clarified? Are there appropriate transitions?

Understanding the revision process and its significance will help you become a better writer. Working with others to revise your text at the collegiate level will make you a more critical reader as well.