You will almost always need to carry out five operations on
any piece of text: print, edit, revise, upgrade and remodel:
◆ Printyour material to achieve a shift of perspective from
writing on your PC. If you only edit text on-screen
your changes will be too confined to small corrections and
changes at a verbal level. Working on paper will help you
see how more thorough-going alterations are feasible, such
as moving large chunks of text around over several pages.
◆ Editmeans a word-level edit of your raw text to remove
mis-spellings, grammar mistakes, tiresome repetitions of the
same word or phrase, and other infelicities. Do not leave your
text untouched with these problems still around. So long as
they remain uncorrected, their presence will tend to obscure
other defects from you. Getting to a clean text lets you see
beyond the clutter, to any deeper intellectual problems.
◆ Revisecovers a paragraph-level reconsideration of how one
idea chains to the next. It focuses on improving things by
small-scale switches around in the order of sentences or
paragraph chunks. It can also cover more substantive
changes, especially in the beginnings and ends of
paragraphs (remembering the Topic, Body, Wrap sequence).
◆ Upgradeinvolves going back from your piece of text to your
original materials and considering whether you can
strengthen the arguments in any way. Can you cite more
scholarly support for points you have made? Or bring
in additional empirical evidence? Or reanalyse your data to
knock out possible competing interpretations? Can you
extend your key arguments, or develop them in a more
formal or systematic way? You need to be clear when your
approach needs more sustenance and underpinning. But
avoid slipping into ‘thesis paranoia’ by overarguing or
overciting on non-controversial points.
◆ Remodelrefers to a much more radical restructuring of
a chapter or article, which usually requires a very specific
method, described in the next subsection. Text that is
already in a satisfactory condition may not need full-scale
remodelling. But you will normally have to make radical
changes in at least one or two chapters out of eight, unless
you are a very disciplined and consistent writer.
138 ◆AUTHORING A PHD