Photo taken by Hakan Nural on Unsplash.
“Thought vomit”: It’s a phrase I’ve used to describe the beginning of my writing process, at least, since I’ve started attending university. I’ve found that if I empty out my guts (throw my thoughts on paper without stopping until I run out of them) and clean it up later (revise), I get my writing done much more quickly and efficiently. So naturally, when it comes to revision tactics, I’m biased towards Anne Lamott’s similar revision style that she goes over in her article “Shitty First Drafts,” rather than George Dila’s in his article “Rethinking The Shitty First Draft.”
However, my revision isn’t so straightforward as that, which I’ve come to notice by reading Nancy Sommers’ article “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers.” A common theme in it is discrepancies in meaning of revision and that helped me notice I have a bit more “Dila revision” in me than I initially thought.
I describe revision as sitting down specifically to tear apart, analyze, and fix up a “finished”—for lack of a better term—paper; I do whatever I feel is necessary to make the paper better. This is something I’ve mainly thought of doing at the end of a “thought vomit” and then I’d revise again and again until I couldn’t pick it apart any more. When I hit that slump, I have someone else—almost always my father—proofread my paper for me and I start revising again if I find the proofreader’s feedback useful. As I’ve hinted earlier, though, that’s not the only time I revise.
I also revise as I “thought vomit,” albeit on a much more surface level. For example, if I notice that I didn’t capitalize the first letter of a word in an article title, I’ll go back to fix that. I do this because I feel I should fix it while I remember to, just in case I miss it while I’m “properly” revising—that is, revising on a “deeper level,” as Sommers put it; I’m worried that I’ll turn a blind eye to it as a result of my focus being solely directed to “properly” revising.
This surface level “revising while writing” may be milder than what Dila does, but it is similar. That’s not to say I’m not any less similar to Lamott when writing and revising. There’s just more to my revision and writing process than I thought, and I failed to realize that because it didn’t fit into my overarching idea of revision. But in reality, those surface level revisions are still revision.
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