The Crucial Role of Revision

Peer-reading and Revision:   Your in-class, peer-revision activity is intended to show the importance of revision in the writing process,    not only the input we receive but also the input we give our peers.      

Pechenik says that “the best way to become an effective reviser of your own writing is to become the critical reader of other people’s writing.”   Critiquing the work of others refines our insights and gives us a language to talk about writing analytically.    
 
Writing--communicating--is a crucial aspect of any intellectual discipline, including the sciences.   And Pechenik reminds us that, “your goal as a writer is to communicate, clearly and succinctly, making it as easy as possible for readers to follow your argument.”

Revision is essential to effective communication.  It is not a step to leave to the end. For advice in revising your own work, be sure to consult the excellent materials on Revision in Chapter 5 of Pechenik.

About the importance of revision, Pechenik says, “Successful writers are not necessarily more gifted than you are;  most of them just revise more often.”

Even the best writers in their disciplines share their work with colleagues, to get the feedback needed to produce an essay that communicates effectively with an academic audience.   Some writers argue that writing IS revision, because no one gets it entirely “right” the first time.

LARC invites you to think of Revision on two levels:

editorial:  the most common view is that revision means fixing our mistakes: misspelled words, wrong word choices, or our “grammars.”
This level of revision tends to focus on language, but our language is  inseparable from they way we think and mirrors that process.     

conceptual:  this deeper level of revision means re-thinking our information and ideas, getting a deeper understanding of our concepts as we reword them in new drafts.  

Pechenik is eloquent on conceptual revision, arguing as follows:   

All writing  benefits from revision.  For one thing, the acts of writing and rereading what you have written typically clarify your thinking.  Then, too, there is the universal difficulty of getting any point across (intact) to a reader, even when you finally know precisely what it is that you want to say.  Revising your work improves communication and often leads you to a firmer understanding of what you are writing about.  

Think of the word revision metaphorically as “re-seeing,” or getting a different “picture” or understanding of what we are writing when we write new drafts.   Interestingly,  when we get a “clearer picture” conceptually, our writing, our language becomes clearer.  Therefore, we communicate more effectively.  

In other words, in the process of revising our writing, there is a reciprocal relationship between thinking and language, thoughts and words. Clarifying one helps clarify the other.

During your in-class revision activity, your feedback as peer readers can help your colleagues “see” what they’re missing and improve the quality of both their language and their thinking.   In turn, the insights and language you develop in critiquing others will benefit you in revising your own essays.  


 Suggestions for providing Lab Report Feedback

Your Lab Manual presents an excellent “Checklist” for providing feedback to your peers.  Here are some highlights:

--Each section should contain only the material appropriate for that section (thus, no “discussion” in the “results” section, or results in methods, and so forth).

--The Introduction should clearly state the PURPOSE of the research
that was done, as well as the relevant BACKGROUND material.     What did the researchers want to find out?  Did they have a hypothesis?  Or, was an existing  hypothesis being tested?

--The Introduction may contain a MIX OF VERB TENSES (for instance, “Data on the role of scales is scarce, so a comparative study was done to test the hypothesis that scales perform a role in...” Or, “We predict that, at a given light intensity, red light will produce..”)

--The Methods section presents the DISTINCT STEPS that the researchers took.  These are clearly explained in a logical order.   Include all the steps, but only the essential details.   

Write this section in the PAST TENSE.   Use DECLARATIVE SENTENCES; avoid “cookbook” instructions.

--Also written in the past tense, the Results section should highlight important PATTERNS  or trends.  

Be sure to tell the “story” your data point to, Do not assume the reader will automatically interpret data correctly, even if it is neatly presented in tables and graphs.

--The Discussion section presents the authors’ CONCLUSIONS, including explanations of unexpected results and suggestions for future research.

--The Discussion section creates CLOSURE, connecting results to the PURPOSE of the research, as stated in the Introduction.  If there was a hypothesis, did the results support it?  

In addition to the above criteria, feedback should focus on the structure and coherence of the report, as well as the clarity and “correctness” of the sentence-level writing.  

Sources (literature) should be cited correctly (see Pechenik, Chapter 4).  List only sources cited in the text.