Expert answer:Common Theme Reading Activity 5

Solved by verified expert:Common Theme Reading/Activity 5No unread replies.No replies.Read Joseph Harris’s chapter on revision from the book Re-Writing (2006). Consider the advice he gives and try to synthesize some of the most important points in a well-constructed annotation. Remember that, for the purposes of this course, an annotation has three parts:A formal citation in MLA or APAOne paragraph that effectively and thoroughly summarizes the main arguments/ideasOne paragraph that considers the credibility of the author as well as the usefulness of the argument. For this reading, you should consider which pieces of advice from this chapter are most relevant for your own writing process. Try to answer how this chapter might help you rethink your revision strategies for your upcoming final draft.Check attachments.
rewriting_harris.pdf

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Rewriting
Joseph Harris
Published by Utah State University Press
Harris, J..
Rewriting: How To Do Things With Texts.
Logan: Utah State University Press, 2006.
Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.
For additional information about this book
https://muse.jhu.edu/book/9248
Access provided by University Of South Florida Libraries (21 Jun 2017 20:02 GMT)
5
Revising
First Draft of Paper Inadvertently Becomes Final Draft
EUGENE, OR—The first draft of an English 140 paper by University
of Oregon sophomore Marty Blain ultimately became the final draft,
Blain reported Monday. “I was gonna keep working on it and add a
bunch of stuff about how the guy who wrote [The Great Gatsby] was
affected by a lot of the stuff going on around him,” she said. “But then
I was like, fuck it.” Blair said that she spent the time that would have
been devoted to revision watching Friends in her dorm’s TV lounge.
—The Onion, September 27, 2000
I’m dying for some action
I’m sick of sitting ’round here trying to
write this book.
—Bruce Springsteen, “Dancing in the Dark”
S
o far in this book I’ve offered you four moves for rewriting—for
making the words, ideas, and images of others part of your own
project as a writer. In this last chapter, I propose some ways of using
those moves in revising—that is, in rethinking, refining, and developing—
your own work-in-progress as writer. Revising is thus a particular form of
what throughout this book I’ve called rewriting; it names the work of returning to a draft of a text you’ve written in order to make your thinking in
it more nuanced, precise, suggestive, and interesting.
My method here will be to work in the mode of the previous four chapters—to ask what it might mean to come to terms with, forward, counter,
98
or take the approach of your own text-in-progress. My hope is that doing so
will allow me offer a view of revising that, on the one hand, doesn’t reduce
it to a mere fiddling with sentences, to editing for style and correctness, but
that also, on the other hand, avoids lapsing into mystical exhortations for
risk taking or critical self-awareness or some other vague but evidently desirable quality of mind. My aim is instead to describe revising as a knowable
practice, as a consistent set of questions you can ask of a draft of an essay
that you are working on:
•
•
•
•
What’s your project? What do you want to accomplish in this essay? (Coming to Terms)
What works? How can you build on the strengths of your draft?
(Forwarding)
What else might be said? How might you acknowledge other
views and possibilities? (Countering)
What’s next? What are the implications of what you have to say?
(Taking an Approach)
While these questions are straightforward, they are not easy. Revising is the sort of thing that is fairly simple to describe but very hard to do
well—like playing chess, or serving in tennis, or teaching a class. It is also
an activity that tends to be hidden from view. As readers we usually come
upon texts in their final form—with many of the hesitations, repetitions,
digressions, false starts, alternative phrasings, inconsistencies, speculations,
infelicities, and flat-out mistakes of earlier drafts smoothed over, corrected,
or erased. Another way to put this is to say that finished texts tend to conceal much of the labor involved in writing them. Since we rarely get to see
the early drafts of most published texts, it can often seem as though other
writers work, as it were, without ever blotting a line, confidently progressing through their texts from start to finish, paragraph to paragraph, chapter to chapter, as if they were speaking them aloud. This one-draft view of
writing is reinforced by most movie and TV depictions of writers at work,
as we watch them quickly type perfectly balanced and sequenced sentences
until, with a sigh of satisfaction, they pound out The End or press Send. It
is also a view inculcated by the pace and structure of American schooling,
whose frequent exams reward students who can produce quick clean essays
Revising
99
on demand. A result is that much of what little instruction that does get offered in writing tends to focus on questions of correctness. Handbooks are
filled with advice on proofreading and teachers downgrade for mistakes in
grammar and spelling.
But while the moments of both inspiration and correction, of creating a text and fixing its errors, are well marked in our culture, the work of
revision, of rethinking and reshaping a text, is rarely noted. With the exception of a few literati who, in anticipation of future biographies and critical
editions, seem to save all their papers, early drafts tend to get cleared off
the desk or deleted from the hard drive once a project is finished, or even
as it is being written. In fact, one of the few places where you can readily
trace how a project evolves from one draft to the next—and thus make the
labor of writing it more visible—is in a university writing course. Several
of the examples in this chapter are thus drawn, with their permission, from
the writings of students in courses I have taught. Each is an example of a
student working with—commenting on, analyzing, rethinking—a draft of
his or her own writing. For that is perhaps the key challenge of revising, to
find a way to step outside of your own thinking and to look at the text you
are working on as another reader might. But before looking at strategies
for revising in detail, let me briefly distinguish it from two other important
forms of work on an academic essay.
Drafting, Revising, Editing
For most academic writers, work on a piece begins long before they sit down
at a keyboard or desk and continues well past their first attempts at putting
their thoughts into prose. They tend, that is, to imagine a text they are writing less as a performance (which is what an exam calls for) and more as a
work-in-progress, as an ongoing project that they can add to and reshape
over time. And while the working habits of individual writers are too varied
to be generalized into a single process of composing, you can think of the
labor of writing as involving:
•
•
100
Drafting, or generating text.
Revising, or working with the text you’ve created, rethinking and
reshaping what you want to say.
Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts
•
Editing, or working on your text as an artifact, preparing the
final version of your document.
The three form an intuitive sequence: First, you move from ideas to
words on the screen or page; next you reconsider and rework what you’ve
written, often with the help of responses from readers; and, finally, you edit,
design, and format your final document. In practice, though, these forms of
work tend to be overlapping and recursive: Most writers do some amount
of revising and editing as they draft (although it is usually wise not to invest
too much time in polishing a passage before you know for sure if you will
even include it in the final version of your text); serious revision almost
always involves the drafting of some new prose; and the careful editing of a
piece can often lead back into a more extensive revising of it.
By far the most elusive of these three forms of work is drafting—or
what is sometimes called invention. Trying to figure out something to write
about has been the frustration of writing students—and their teachers—for
decades. Stephen King puts the problem with his usual plainspoken acuity
in his novel Misery—in which the writer of a popular series of paperback
romances is held hostage by a demented fan and forced to write a new book
to her liking. (In other words, the novel is about a writing class.) Here are
the thoughts of King’s captive author as he desperately tries to get started
on his new book:
Another part of him was furiously trying out ideas, rejecting them,
trying to combine them, rejecting the combinations. He sensed this going on but had no direct contact with it and wanted none. It was dirty
down there in the sweatshops.
He understood what he was doing now as Trying to Have an
Idea. Trying to Have an Idea wasn’t the same thing as Getting an
Idea. Getting an Idea was a more humble way of saying I am inspired, or Eureka! My muse has spoken! . . .
This other process—Trying to Have an Idea—was nowhere
near as exalted or exalting, but
it was every bit as mysterious
Intertexts
and every bit as necessary. BeStephen King, Misery (New York:
cause when you were writing
Signet, 1988), 119ë20.
a novel you almost always got
Revising
101
roadblocked somewhere, and there was no sense in trying to go until
you Had an Idea.
His usual procedure when it was necessary to Have an Idea was
to put on his coat and go for a walk. He recognized walking as good
exercise, but it was boring. If you didn’t have someone to talk to while
you walked, a book was a necessity. But if you needed to Have an Idea,
boredom could be to a roadblocked novel what chemotherapy was to
a cancer patient.
I can’t claim to have all that much to say about how to begin writing
an essay. For me, like King, the deep origins of words and ideas seem more
often than not mysterious and untraceable. But King does also offer us a
number of useful ways of thinking about this mystery. First, he points to
the importance of seizing hold of those ideas that do somehow come to
you. The volume next to the one you were looking for on the library shelf,
the comment from another class that continues to echo in your head, the
connection you notice between the papers and books that happen to be sitting on your desk, the song or movie that a text reminds you of—work on
an essay often begins with such serendipities. Second, King notes the value
of patience, of knowing when you’re stalled, when you simply need to take
a break. Similarly, he speaks of the usefulness of boredom, of letting ideas
percolate. Finally, he suggests that a writer often needs to start not from
a moment of inspiration (eureka!) but from the need to work through a
conceptual problem or roadblock. Indeed, I’d suggest that most academic
writing begins with such questions rather than insights, with difficulties in
understanding rather than moments of mastery.
What I hope I can tell you more about is how to revise a text you’ve
begun to write, to work with the words you’ve started to put on the page
or screen. Perhaps the most common mistake that student writers make
is to slight the work of revising—either by trying to conceive and draft an
entire text from start to end in a single sitting, without pausing to consider
alternate (and perhaps more interesting) ways of developing their ideas,
or by worrying so much about issues of editing and correctness that they
hardly allow themselves to think about anything else at all. (It is only too
possible, as any writing teacher can tell you, to create a text that is wonderfully designed, phrased, formatted, edited, and proofread—but that says
102
Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts
almost nothing.) Many students enter college without really ever having
been asked to rethink their views on an issue or to restructure the approach
they’ve taken in an essay. They’ve been trained in how to find and fix mistakes, and perhaps even in how to respond to specific questions about a
draft posed by their teacher. But their final drafts are essentially the same
as their first ones—only cleaner, smoother, more polished. They have been
taught how to edit but not how to revise.
In revising, the changes you make to a text are connected. They form a
plan of work. For instance, if in reworking the introduction to an essay, you
realize that you also need to change the order of the paragraphs that follow
it, then you are revising. Or if dealing with a new example also requires you
to adjust some of your key words or concepts, you are revising. Or if in rethinking the implications of your argument at the end of an essay, you also
begin to see a stronger way of beginning it, you are revising. And so on. In
revising, one change leads to others. You edit sentences; you revise essays.
The changes you make in editing tend to be ad hoc and local. To edit is
to fine-tune a document. Proofreading is the extreme case: You simply correct a typo or a mistake in punctuation and move on. Nothing else needs to
be done; no other changes need to be made. Similarly, you can often edit for
style, recast the wording of a particular sentence to make it more graceful
or clear, without having to alter much (or anything) else in the paragraph
of which it is part. You can even sometimes insert a sentence or two in a
paragraph—to add an example, clarify a point, answer a question—while
making few or no other changes to it. Indeed I’ve seen entire blocks of text
dropped into an essay without sending any ripples at all into the paragraphs
before or after it, but rather leaving the original flow of ideas serenely undisturbed. The aim of revising is to rethink the ideas and examples that
drive your thinking in an essay; the aim of editing is to improve the flow
and design of your document. Both forms of work are important. But simply editing a text that needs to be rethought and revised is like waxing a car
that needs repairs to its engine.
Tracking Revision
You can begin to see how the work of revising differs from that of editing
by mapping the changes you make in moving from one draft of an essay to
Revising
103
the next. Most word processing programs have a “track changes” or “compare documents” tool that you can use to record the changes you make in
keyboarding a new version of an essay. Using this tool allows you to mark
where you
•
•
•
•
•
Add to
Delete
Move (cut and paste)
Rework (select and type over)
Reformat a text you are working on.
You can of course also note and mark such changes by hand; the software simply cuts down on some of the drudgery involved.
Revising an essay is complex and difficult intellectual work. But it is
work not only with ideas but text. You can’t just think changes to an essay;
you need to make them. (This is a lesson I’ve learned to my chagrin only
too many times—as paragraphs that seemed to flow clearly in my mind
when I was in the shower or out for a walk with the dogs somehow become
muddled and intractable when I sit down to type them out.) At some point,
that is, you have to translate plans and ideas into the material labor of adding, cutting, moving, reworking, or reformatting text. While revising clearly
involves more than keyboarding, all of the work you do in rethinking a text
will find its final expression in some combination of those five functions.
Tracking the changes you make in keyboarding a new draft of an essay can
thus help make the conceptual work you’ve done in revising more visible.
Let me offer an example. Here is the opening paragraph of the first
draft of an essay written by Abhijit Mehta, a student in a writing course, in
response to an assignment that asked him to describe some of the distinctive ways a particular group makes use of language—to reflect on how they
give their own spin, as it were, to the meanings of certain words. Abhijit
decided to write on the vocabulary of his own field of study, mathematics:
The Strange Language of Math
As our society becomes more dependant on technology, the work of
mathematicians and physicists comes closer to everyday experience.
In order to have a basic understanding of many modern issues and
technologies, people need to become more familiar with the language
104
Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts
of math and science. However,
Intertexts
mathematicians and physicists
Abhijit
Mehta,
“The Playful Lanhave a tendancy to use common
guage
of
Math”
(1st and 2nd
words in a strange way. In math
drafts),
unpublished
essay, Duke
and physics, nice, elegant, triviUniversity, 2002.
al, well-behaved, charm, flavor,
strange, and quark all have meanings that can be very different
from their everyday meanings. Mathematicians and physicists often
use common words to express ideas that are very complex.
The rest of the essay follows the plan laid out in this paragraph, as Abhijit goes on to discuss the particular meanings mathematicians give to each
of the terms he mentions—nice, elegant, trivial, and so on—in the order
that he lists them. What the readers of his first draft told Abhijit, though,
was that while in creating this catalogue of odd usages he had assembled
the materials for an interesting essay, he hadn’t yet suggested what those
specialized uses told us about the culture of math. Indeed, the problem with
the draft is hinted at in its title, which simply says that the language of math
is “strange” but doesn’t specify how. His readers thus asked Abhijit for a
more precise sense of the attitudes and values that lay behind the usages he
discussed. What kind of “strangeness” connected the ways mathematicians
used these words?
Hard questions, but it turned out that Abhijit had answers to them.
Here is the opening of his second and revised draft.
The Playful Language of Math
As our society becomes more dependent on technology, the work of
mathematicians and physicists comes closer to everyday experience. In
order to have a basic understanding of many modern issues and technologies, people need to become more familiar with the language of
math and science. However, mathematicians and physicists have a tendency to use common words to describe complex things. In math and
physics, nice, elegant, trivial, well-behaved, charm, flavor, strange, and
quark all have meanings that can be very different from their everyday
meanings. The migration of these words from common usage to their
specialized usage conveys some of the playful attitude that mathematicians and physicists have towards abstract, complex problems.
Revising
105
And here is a version that maps the keyboarding changes between the two
paragraphs. Words deleted from the first draft are struck through; text added to the second draft is underlined.
The Strange Playful Language of Math
As our society becomes more dependant dependent on technology,
the work of mathematicians and physicists comes closer to everyday
experience. In order to have a basic understanding of many modern
issues and technologies, people need to become more familiar with the
language of math and science. However, mathematicians and physicists have a tendancy tendency to use common words in a strange way.
to describe complex things. In math and physics, nice, elegant, trivial,
well-behaved, charm, flavor, strange, and quark all have meanings that
can be very different from their everyday meanings. Mathematicians
and physicists often use common words to express ideas that are very
complex. The migration of these words from common usage to their
specialized usage conveys some of the playful attitude that mathematicians and physicists have towards abstract, complex problems.
This map of changes shows that Abhijit was working on at least three
different levels in moving from his first to second draft: At the most mundane level, he did some proofreading and corrected the spellings of dependent and tendency. Such work is simple correction, necessary but uninteresting. On a second level, he also edited for clarity and concision, combining two sentences that say almost the same thing in his first draft (mathematicians have a “tendancy to use common words in a strange way” and
“often use common words to express ideas that are very complex”) into a
single briefer statement in the second (“a tendency to use common words
to express complex things”). But while such editing helps the flow of this
particular paragraph, its impact does not extend beyond it. While intelligent and helpful, it remains a local edit, unconnected to a larger pattern of
revision throug …
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