Writing Assignment One: Revising for a Consistent Tone/Style and Revising to Document

Due: As always, this Sunday.


When your group came together to research the genre of the process description, I had your group produce a collaborative paper which brought together your research and advice. This week, I want you to get together with your group and get this document ready to publish and share with the class and other students. I will pick the best two papers, and I will publish them on a web site I am developing providing advice to students on how to write in particular genres. The website is due to come online this next academic year, and all the students at Reynolds will be able to use it.

As the semester winds down, there are still a couple of essential revision skills you need to learn to be ready for English 112, that is, revising to obtain improve organization and revising to create a consistent style.

At present, most of the advice you brought together looks as if it were put together by a team. This is just fine, as it was brought together by a group of writers, and if you had no readers beyond yourselves; but, readers are used to most of their reading looking as if it was produced by a single author. Increasingly, documents are produced collaboratively, but readers are old fashioned and lazy.

The way teams of authors produce the illusion of a document being produced by a single author is to figure out a way to integrate what they have to say under a shared organization and to use a consistent style and tone through out their shared writing.

How do you integrate what four or more people have to say? Well, the best method I know is a technique called a post draft outline. Post draft outlines are good for improving loose organization, after you've got an initial draft down. In fact, they are useful for improving organization in general and for figuring out places where you still need to develop claims of to clarify.

When you produce a post draft outline, you go through a draft writing down two things: the major claims or points you make and then how you develop these claims. You do this in outline form. What you end up with is an outline of the major points you make in a piece of writing and the evidence, examples, etc. you have used to develop them. The outlive gives you a kind of skematic picture of your paper, and this short hand overview is useful for seeing and playing with questions of organization and of development.

Get together with your group, and produce a post draft outline of your process description advice. You can do this by having each member produce a post draft outline for part of the paper your wrote.

When you are done, get together--maybe with a conference call--and look at the outline you have produced collaboratively. Are there places where you repeat the same point? Are there places where you made a claim but didn't develop it? Do you use sufficient evidence, examples, etc. to tie together the advice you are giving? Do you give your audience a "road map" to what you will be covering and how you will cover it? Do you follow this road map? Is there a clear sense of there being an introduction and an end to your paper?

As you answer these questions, work with your group to fill in any blanks you find. Get rid of places where you repeat the same information. Combine your best explanations and examples. Finally, play around with the organization of your paper. Just because your first draft had one organization pattern, this doesn't mean that it's the best one out there. Maybe it would be more logical to change the advice you give, so you--for instance--explain to those who would write a good process paper what to do in each stage of the writing process. Maybe you want a section on what information a writer needs to have in place to write a good process paper, or maybe you want to give advice on what pieces of information good process description always has in it and to provide plenty of examples. Play with different ideas and decide on a logical way to develop your paper, not just the organization which happens when you initially got your ideas together. This is what you are after, that is, giving the reader a sense that your writing is coherent, logical, and has some governing principle of organization.

A useful tactic to discover ways to organize papers is to look at good examples and to figure out how they are organized. Over the years, when I've been tasked with writing in a new genre, not only do I research the advice which is out there on best practices, I look for several examples, and I then borrow the best ideas for organization.

OK. You've come up with a great organization for your advice to new writers on writing process descriptions; you've filled in all the holes in your development; and, your paper is well developed; and, most important, it's organization and development are coherent and logical.

What now?

Now you do a revision for style and tone. When you draft your cover letter (You are drafting your cover letter now? Aren't you???), I have asked that you follow the KISS/SVO<24 class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">consistent sense of style to your well organized draft. Since the KISS style focuses on clarity, short sentences, and strong nouns and verbs, as you revise every one's writing into the KISS style, you are also creating a paper using a single style.

My advice? Break up your well organized draft and have everyone in your group take on one section to revise to the KISS style. Then change up. With two eyes having done the revision for each section, chances are you'll end up with a well organized paper written in a consistent, single style.

When you write future papers, make sure to include revision passes where you take the time to check your organization and revise to a consistent style. I hope, by now, you are gaining a sense of just how much time and effort a well written paper takes, and you have learned to start early and give yourself the time it takes to do your best work and to make multiple revisions. It has been my experience, that these steps come out to the difference in a letter grade or more, and they allow you to ask essential questions like: "Are there places where I could have developed my explanations and evidence more?" "Have a organized my paper in a logical, consistent manner?" "Does my paper have a central focus, and do I maintain this focus?" "Is the style I've chosen the best one for my audience and purpose?"