Revision is a necessity.

There’s a rule in sewing: Measure twice, cut once. Thankfully, writing is a bit more forgiving. In writing, revision is a necessity.

Berkenkotter

Carol Berkenkotter’s “Decisions and Revisions: The Strategies of a Publishing Writer” is rather misleading at first. On the surface, and for much of her study, she focuses on her protocols and processes. It obscures her subject: revision in writing. Yet this is an essential part of this study, and one that I read between the lines to find. I understand, as all researchers do, that focus on process is important to a good study; case studies more so than some others.

Berkenkotter says of Murray that “…an extensive planner does not really explain the nature or scope of his revisions.” While true, that she makes a point to bring up his planning does not fully satisfy what I had hoped to learn about revision and how it functions. Yes, planning goes into a good portion of it. Yes, examining the thought process, the way we discover new trains of thought, how it all interconnects is worthwhile. Yet, and this may be on me: I found it all to be very common sense. I struggled with engaging while reading, as I had to keep stifling the repeated thought of “well, obviously.”

Murray

Donald Murray’s “Response of a Laboratory Rat-or, Being Protocoled”, on the other hand, was more interesting and enlightening to me. Rarely do we as researchers get to hear what being a lab rat is like. Murray says he would have done anything to escape the pressure of that room, one he was in for a mere hour. I wonder how earlier studies were skewed by the unnaturalness of their setting? The fact that he’s made a career of being a self-study lab rat makes it more poignant; the inexperienced subjects may have had worse anxiety than he did.

Murray agreed with most of the conclusions Berkenkotter drew, and that in itself was not surprising. Murray has a good deal of self-awareness. “Writing is intimate, yet you should bare your soul anyway” he proclaims, and he’s right. To pull apart one’s writing and the mental process is to become aware of oneself and ones proclivities to a relatively uncomfortable degree.

Revision and Me: I Do The Least

For my part, I sympathize with Berkenkotter’s attempts to record every turn of thought. I, too, often think faster than I can record. Taking the sudden twists and sharp turns of my thought process into account as Murray had to for Berkenkotter would be difficult for me too. I don’t revise all too often – much like my first drafts, revision and writing happens mentally. Physically, I do not revise more than once or twice per paper. I often do any revision while in the midst of writing; brand new drafts turn into finished papers in the span of one writing session.

Yet for all that I do not actively sit down and revise, I still do some form of it. Murray very clearly values revision, and Berkenkotter was fascinated enough to study it, though I again posit that her study read as a “water is wet” than anything else. Revision is a necessity, and if I took anything from what I parsed out, it was that.

For a much more in-depth discussion on Revision, see the class webpage: https://eng2020.chrisfriend.us/blog/category/process/revising/