Revising a draft in three passes

A first draft is a record of what you thought while writing it. A finished piece is what you want the reader to think while reading it. Revision is the work of getting from one to the other, and it is easy to do badly: you read the draft from the top, fix whatever catches your eye, and arrive at the end with a slightly tidier version of the same problems.

The approach we suggest is to revise in separate passes, each looking for one kind of problem, from the largest to the smallest. Three passes is enough for most essays. Doing them in order matters, because there is no point polishing a sentence in a paragraph you are about to cut.

Let it cool first

Before any pass, put the draft away. A day is good; a week is better if you have it. While the draft is warm, you read what you meant to say rather than what is on the page. Your memory fills the gaps so smoothly that you cannot see them.

When you come back, read it once straight through without changing anything. Keep a slip of paper beside you and jot down where you got bored, where you got lost, and where you wanted to skip ahead. Those three kinds of moment are the most honest feedback you will get before anyone else reads it.

Pass one: structure

The first pass ignores sentences entirely. You are asking only whether the piece is built in the right order, with nothing missing and nothing extra.

The most useful tool here is a reverse outline. Go through the draft and, beside each paragraph, write a few words saying what it does. Not what it says, what it does: “gives the example”, “states the objection”, “repeats the opening”. Then read the list of notes on its own, without the draft.

Problems that were invisible in the prose become obvious in the list:

• Two paragraphs that do the same job, far apart.
• A paragraph that does three jobs at once.
• A long run of setup before the piece says what it is about.
• A conclusion that introduces a new idea the essay never earned.

Fix these by moving, merging and cutting whole paragraphs. It is often the case that the real opening is somewhere in the second or third paragraph, and the first can simply go. Check that the piece still has one clear claim, the spine described in From a drawer of notes to a finished essay, and that every section serves it. If your sections have headings, read the headings alone: they should tell the story of the piece in miniature.

Pass two: paragraphs

Once the order is right, go back through paragraph by paragraph. Now you are asking whether each paragraph works as a unit.

Read only the first sentence of each paragraph, in order. In a well-built essay, those sentences alone make a rough summary of the argument. Where they do not, either the first sentence is not doing its job, or the paragraph is about something other than what it opens with. Rewrite the opening sentence, or split the paragraph.

Then look at the joins. Each paragraph should make the reader ready for the next. Where the move between them feels abrupt, you usually need one bridging sentence, not a transition word. “However” and “moreover” promise a connection; only the content can deliver one.

This is also the pass for cutting. Look for paragraphs that explain something the reader already understood, and examples that make the same point as the example before. Cutting good material is hard. It helps to keep a file of cut passages; they are often the beginning of another piece, and knowing they are saved makes it easier to let them go.

Pass three: sentences

Only now do you look closely at the sentences. The best single method we know is to read the piece aloud, slowly, to an empty room. Your ear catches what your eye forgives: sentences that run out of breath, words repeated too close together, rhythms that all sound the same.

A few things to look for on this pass:

1. Hedges. “Perhaps”, “somewhat”, “it could be argued”. One or two honest qualifications are good. A hedge in every sentence makes the whole piece sound unsure of itself.
2. Buried verbs. “Made a decision to” is “decided”. “Is in agreement with” is “agrees”. Turning nouns back into verbs usually makes a sentence shorter and livelier.
3. Vague nouns. “Aspect”, “factor”, “element”, “thing”. Ask what you actually mean and name it.
4. Long openings. A sentence that spends twenty words on setup before reaching its subject can usually be turned around.

If you are writing in a language that is not your first, this pass has some particular traps and some particular freedoms; we have written about them in Writing essays in a second language.

Knowing when to stop

Revision has no natural end, which is why it needs a deliberate one. A reasonable sign that you are done: on a final read-through, the changes you want to make are swaps rather than improvements. You replace one adequate word with another adequate word, and then change it back. That is the moment to stop.

It also helps to remember that publishing on a shelf of your own is not carving in stone. If you notice something later, you can revise the piece and file the corrected version. But do not use that as a reason to publish a draft you know is not ready. Readers here come to read slowly, and they deserve a piece that has been through all three passes.

Before you publish, one last practical check: read the title and excerpt on their own. They are what readers see on the slip before they open the piece, so make sure they say what the essay actually argues, now that revision has changed it.