more effective way of keeping up with the mind and using more of its
creativity.
The same can be said for revision. The importance of this stage lies
in the fact that it allows you the freedom to focus more of your atten-
tion on the ideas in the writing stage and on your creative use of lan-
guage. If you make mistakes with your grammar, your spelling, or your
sentence structures, don’t worry, you can pick them up and sort them
out in the revision stage.Cooling offThe shift from the writer in you to the editor, then, involves a shift of
focus from the creative activity of converting your ideas into language
to a more self-conscious focus on the way you’ve used words, phrases
and structures. The editor inside you should be asking, how does it
sound, is it fluent, does it move logically from one stage in the argu-
ment to another, are there sections that need more evidence, or more
development?
With this in mind, you’ve got to allow yourself to undergo a conver-
sion from the writer to the editor, from the artist to the craftsman. To
do this, the first thing is to put your essay aside. Allow yourself a
cooling off period of at least a day, so your editor can surface. It’s
not that you’re trying to create objectivity between yourself and what
you’ve written. This would endanger those rich insights you saw in
your ideas when you first began to plan and write them. It’s these that
first engaged your interest and commitment, and they’re likely to
engage your readers’ too. So, if you were to revise in an objective, dis-
passionate frame of mind, you might kill the very thing that’s likely to
grab your readers and make them think.
Nevertheless, aware of these dangers, try to approach your work as
you believe the examiner or any reader will approach it. Allow yourself
to feel the impact of your original insights as you expect the reader to
be affected too.Revise with a purposeHowever, once you begin to revise you will soon find your most diffi-
cult problem is that there are so many things to check – so many ques-
tions to ask of your work. The only effective way of making this simpler260 RevisionHTW32 7/27/01 8:48 AM Page 260