Editing: introduction

Revision focuses on getting a handle on what your writing is about, where you want it to go. Generally speaking, revision is when you are still dealing with changes that could be as large as entire paragraphs, possibly your overall focus.

Revision and editing can sometime blend. But for the sake of our efforts in this course, I will suggest that editing is what you do toward the end of a project. Editing concerns how your essay communicates to a different set of eyes and ears than the ones which wrote it.

A good practice for editing: be more self-conscious about the sound and shape of your writing–something we take for granted. In order not to take it for granted (since you have been working on this essay and it probably makes sense to you), we need to defamiliarize it.

• Read it aloud–hear the writing. Have a peer read it aloud or read it aloud yourself. Read it backwards, paragraph by paragraph or sentence by sentence: listening for places where the expression/communication (the how of the writing, the mechanics, the style) is not matching up with the idea. Usage errors would be one way expression and ideas get crossed.

in writing pair: select a paragraph you want to focus on for editing–want to improve/revise. Have partner read your paragraph aloud. Then discuss for 1-2 minutes what you hear and see–suggestions for what you might need to do or want to do with the paragraph.

• More active than passive. Richard Lanham’s Paramedic Method (from Revising Prose, 5th edition, Pearson 2007)): one strategy to pay better attention to the way your “voice” is informed by the machinery of sentence length, verb (active vs passive), prepositions. These are not ‘errors’ but choices you make in presentation. We will be returning to this in later editing workshops. For today, let’s focus on the issue of crafting and clarifying the action of our sentences.

1]Circle the prepositions

2]Circle the “is” forms.

3]Find the action

4]Put this action in a simple (not compound) active verb.

5]Start fast–no slow windups. [the passive construction is often connected with too-conversational kinds of beginnings: 'One of the things that I think about reading is that reading is engaging for the mind.'  in contrast: "Reading engages the mind."

focus today on 1-5: the issue of using active verbs and active voice [also discussed effectively in Hacker, p. 140]

• Some formal/presentational features to consider and not neglect:

–title? I will be crushed to see an essay titled ‘paper #1′

–introduction/conclusion: how do you bring the reader into your story? where do you leave the reader? A strategy to consider: start in with the narrative, or in the middle of an experience, before pulling back to more general set-up. And conclude by circling back to your beginning. [these are tricky--will continue to work on this in later workshops]

• Have in mind a few of the mechanical/surface errors you tend to make and will need to clean up.

You can use this list of the 20 most common formal errors that can be edited–list provided by the Writing Center.

editing: an introduction

Revision focuses on getting a handle on what your writing is about, where you want it to go. Generally speaking, revision is when you are still dealing with changes that could be as large as entire paragraphs, possibly your overall focus.

Revision and editing can sometime blend. But for the sake of our efforts in this course, I will suggest that editing is what you do toward the end of a project. Editing concerns how your essay communicates to a different set of eyes and ears than the ones which wrote it.

A good practice for editing: be more self-conscious about the sound and shape of your writing–something we take for granted. In order not to take it for granted (since you have been working on this essay and it probably makes sense to you), we need to defamiliarize it.

 

Read it aloud–hear the writing. Have a peer read it aloud or read it aloud yourself. Read it backwards, paragraph by paragraph or sentence by sentence: listening for places where the expression/communication (the how of the writing, the mechanics, the style) is not matching up with the idea. Usage errors would be one way expression and ideas get crossed.

in writing pair: select a paragraph you want to focus on for editing–want to improve/revise. Have partner read your paragraph aloud. Then discuss for 1-2 minutes what you hear and see–suggestions for what you might need to do or want to do with the paragraph.

 

More active than passive. Lanham’s Paramedic Method (from Revising Prose, 5th edition, Pearson 2007)): one strategy to pay better attention to the way your “voice” is informed by the machinery of sentence length, verb (active vs passive), prepositions. These are not ‘errors’ but choices you make in presentation. We will be returning to this in later editing workshops. For today, let’s focus on the issue of crafting and clarifying the action of our sentences.

1]Circle the prepositions

2]Circle the “is” forms.

3]Find the action

4]Put this action in a simple (not compound) active verb.

5]Start fast–no slow windups. [the passive construction is often connected with too-conversational kinds of beginnings: 'One of the things that I think about reading is that reading is engaging for the mind.'  in contrast: "Reading engages the mind."

focus today on 1-5: the issue of using active verbs and active voice [also discussed effectively in Hacker, p. 140]

 

Some formal/presentational features to consider and not neglect:

–title? I will be crushed to see an essay titled ‘paper #1′

–introduction/conclusion: how do you bring the reader into your story? where do you leave the reader? A strategy to consider: start in with the narrative, or in the middle of an experience, before pulling back to more general set-up. And conclude by circling back to your beginning. [these are tricky--will continue to work on this in later workshops]

editing workshop: looking AT/wordle

1. My emphasis on looking AT prose and not simply looking Through it (the traditional model) is informed, as I have mentioned, by a teacher, writer, critic named Richard Lanham. In his book Revising Prose, 5th edition, he offers this summary of how to swiftly assess and fix some typical problems. He calls it the ‘paramedic method’:
2. Circle the prepositions
3. Circle the ‘is’ forms.
4. Find the action.
5. Put this action in a simple (not compound) active verb. [for example: change “Birkerts is writing” to “Birkerts writes”
6. Start fast–no slow windups. [he calls them “blah blah is that” openings; for example: “The fact of the matter is that Birkerts…”
7. Read the passage aloud with emphasis and feeling; I suggest you do this at least once with the entire essay–or perhaps have it read and listen to it.
8. Write out each sentence on a blank screen and mark off its basic rhythmic units with a ‘/.’
9. Mark off sentence length with a ‘/.’ [can also do this by hitting return at end of each sentence, noticing sentence variety (or its absence).

Another way to use digital technology to look AT–really look at–our writing, the shape and vision of our writing: try Wordle. Copy your essay into the box: look for keywords that are important; look for words that are being used too much.

notes: first writing project

Revision workshop:

With help from John Boyd of the Writing Center, we emphasized the importance of all writers, any writer, getting response for their writing, finding audiences for feedback. This is different, I suggested, than needing or wanting to fix something. Not the teacher marking up a paper with a red pen. With our focal point of critical reflection, we used the hear/notice/wonder response sheet to give feedback to a writer in your writing group, focusing in particular on where you noticed the essay providing the kind of depth and understanding in the personal reflection (rather than the resume listing, the nostalgia of quick reference), and where you wanted to see more of it.

Editing workshop:

Focused on ways to think about editing as defamiliarizing our essay–in order to get outside of it and see and hear it from without. One way to do this: read aloud, have someone else read it aloud: listen for areas where the reading stumbles or slows or is unclear. The main point introduced–one we are working on throughout the semester in our attempt to learn about style and how better to grasp it in our writing: need to look AT our style, not just through it. Think more self-consciously about how style is created in the mechanics and machinery of the essay: the words, the sentence structure, the punctuation; all the choices we can make and edit.

As a starting point, we focused on a basic issue (and trap) we find in sentence structure: the difference between active and passive sentences. One of the ways we looked at this: finding places where we see lots of “is” sentences which tend to bury the action; also bury behind lots of prepositions. We began to change this around. The example I gave:

“One thing about reading that I believe is that reading is meant to be fun.”

change to: Reading should be fun.

further change to (recognizing the weakness and vagueness of ‘fun’): Reading cultivates pleasure.

Essay follow-up:

The critical vision–aka, the focus or ‘thesis’ of your essay. Traditionally, this comes in the beginning–you might have been taught at the end of an introductory paragraph. However, things don’t need to be that strict–nor would you want to be terribly blunt: My thesis is…. Sometimes it is effective to have a thesis at the end of an essay; or perhaps an initial statement of your focus/thesis–that you then furhter refine in a conclusion (or in the scientific model, completely change). It is important, however, to engage your reader’s focus directly in your introductory material, let them know, before getting into the “body” of your essay, the various examples and reflection, what you want them to be thinking about with you. You need to give them a thread to take with them. What you need to avoid, then, is a general statement such as: reading has many definitions. You need to go further–suggest what particular definition is on your mind and suggest how you want to explore that. This is something to do during revision: after you have a stronger sense of what you are, in fact, getting into (where your examples and reflection are taking you), then go back and refine and elaborate the thesis–and from this you can then build a more engaging introduction–a stronger way into the story you are trying to tell.

My Work in Progress

You might be interested to know what I am thinking about, reading into, researching around, and generally speaking, currently working on as a writer. I, too, have to compost. But I also have to write and seek to publish in order to figure it out. A good deal of what this project delves into will enter into, and continue to come out of, my teaching. Most specifically, the course you are taking.  

Work in Progress:

The Scholar’s Information: Emerson’s Education in an Electronic Age

 

What becomes of Emerson’s Scholar in the Age of Google? The Scholar’s Information offers two firsts in Emerson studies: the first book to study Emerson’s sustained (and largely forgotten) interest in the theory and practice of education and the first to consider Emerson’s writing in relation to digital communication. Emerson’s understanding of the cultural and pedagogical implications of mediation in his own age of electronic communication can shed light on where we now find ourselves in education generally, literary education specifically.  In elucidating a web of relations between new and old media, between Emerson’s education and Google’s scholar, I focus on Emerson’s crucial conception of metonymy as the basis for learning—indeed, for all thinking. This notion of metonymy links Emersonian analogy with an associational thinking that is prominent in conceptions of hypertext and emphasized in definitions of digital literacy.  I am interested in what this technological correspondence between the information of Emersonian intellect and electronic pedagogy can teach us about the emergence of digital communication in the humanities—and more specifically, how the study of literature and writing can be reconfigured in light of that emergence. While focusing on Emerson’s conception of literary education, this project will also range among other versions of a metonymic pedagogy I locate in Emerson: in Benjamin Franklin’s plans for an English school; in Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas”; in the theories of John Dewey; in the emergence of cybernetics and information technologies; and most recently in calls for a rethinking of English and composition studies in arguments put forth by Robert Scholes and Richard Lanham.

 

Thus far I have completed research on Emerson manuscripts while I was Emerson Memorial Association Fellow at Houghton Library, Harvard University and published an initial article in Emerson Society Papers 2006. Presented on Whitman and digital archives (“Parts of the Actual Distraction”) at two conferences and am revising for article publication.  I am applying for a fellowship from The Library Company of Philadelphia to research 18^th century grammar and rhetoric texts and to complete an article/chapter “Learning at Hand: Benjamin Franklin’s Writing Pedagogy.” Up next is the chapter, “Googling Emerson: The American Scholar and Vannevar Bush’s Memex.”