Rules for Writing 9: Revise, revise, revise

No matter how experienced you are at writing, your first draft is almost certainly going to need a lot of work before it is ready to show anyone. For one thing, you will probably have broken some of my “rules” in your first draft, e.g. by failing to write good transitions, or included points that are not relevant or whose relevance hasn’t been made clear enough. But it’s also about the quality of the writing itself. You should approach each sentence as what it is, namely a first attempt at saying what you wanted to say. It’s pretty unlikely that you nailed it perfectly the first time around! So just assume that each sentence will need changing: it is guilty until proven innocent. 

When I revise one of my main priorities is to make everything more concise. It’s not uncommon for me to remove 10% or more of the words in the process, and that’s despite the fact that I have a very concise writing style. When it comes to student work, I almost always feel that it could be significantly shorter while conveying the same ideas. Most sentences should be short and punchy, like this one. You can throw in occasional longer ones for variety, but they should be in the clear minority. If your sentences are long break them up, which makes it easier to read. (Actually when revising this paragraph, I changed what was the first sentence into two sentences.) I think this is good advice in general, but it is especially relevant for philosophy written in English, because we tend to prize a sharp and precise style, thanks to the dominance of analytic philosophy. (This is much less true of academic German, of course!)

In any case, my main message here is that revising is a key part of the writing process and you should budget plenty of time for doing it. Ideally you would revise more than once, and that means not just looking for typos and mistakes, but genuinely rewriting and fine-tuning as you go. 

Incidentally this advice may also help you when you are writing the first draft, because if you know you’re going to revise a lot, then you will feel less pressure to make it perfect the first time around. Just get something on the page, and you can chisel it into shape later.

And a final piece of advice: a good tactic for revising is reading your own writing out loud to yourself. This may feel silly, but it is a great way to find sentences that are awkward, too long, etc., because your “ear” will tell you when things are not well put, or too convoluted.