Many writers have a secret motto that you may or may not have heard of: Kill your darlings.
I know.
It’s a lot.
It’s just a metaphor, but a little scary, right?
The reason “kill your darlings” has a lot of power, though,
is that it’s a memorable comparison:
it reminds us that we may need a new perspective and to make some radical changes to our writing,
even to our most darling sentences or ideas.
We work on these kinds of changes during revision and use reflective techniques to help us effectively
do this sometimes-challenging work.
That’s what we’ll learn today in Study Hall: Composition, presented by
Arizona State University and Crash Course.
I’m Yumna Samie, let’s get started.
Re-vision.
It means to see again, literally.
To perhaps look at something differently and change our view of it.
Many compositionists divide up revision from editing because edits change small elements
of meaning,
but are mostly focused on refining what’s already there.
Revision, on the other hand, is not small or sentence-level; it’s big, usually affecting
whole sentences, paragraphs, or pages.
It may result in substantial changes: you might move paragraphs around and rewrite them
to make them fit elsewhere.
Sometimes revisions are even big enough to lead us back to drafting.
Remember, we sometimes have to cut things that we thought were brilliant but don’t
quite fit anymore.
That’s killing our darlings!
We revise before we edit because revision is so impactful that editing for typos or
formatting errors first would be a waste of time.
While revising helps us get from a draft to a final product,
many of us get hung up in the pursuit of excellence,
wondering whether some writing that seems great today really needs more revision.
Plato struggled with this same question of excellence.
He had the idea that, in some other plane or dimension, there are perfect “versions”
of everything we see here on Earth.
He called them “forms.”
So all the chairs in the world are imperfect renderings of the platonic form of a chair,
and all puppies are just attempts at the perfect form of a puppy.
Even abstractions, like Earthly justice, are just an effort to get to that platonic form.
In this view, our world is full of things yearning to be their perfect selves.
Regardless of whether you’ve heard of Plato’s forms before, you’ve probably approached
writing projects as if there was a “platonic” solution.
You can imagine the “form” of success, but you aren’t quite sure how to perfect
the draft that’s sitting there, staring up at you, and asking, “what now?”
Perfection may help motivate us to revise and edit, but the truth is that no text can
be perfect:
in fact, all writing exists and gets read in different contexts, so “perfect” could
look like many things, anyway.
Revision is part of the work of making a text excellent, not perfect.
Since there are things you don’t learn until after the draft is written, we aim for responding,
not perfecting.
We want to adjust according to new information, our change in vision.
Our vision changes to achieve at least two goals: discovery and alignment.
Discovery has to do with recognizing that our writing could change
and take a different form,
even if we really liked the first version.
It’s when we take the time to address our options and decide which ones would be helpful
to use, and which ones we need to let go.
Another goal of revision is alignment: seeing if our work fits with what we set out to do,
what our audience wants to read, and the criteria by which we’ll be evaluated.
So for a marketing email, we would have to decide if the email covers everything listed
in the planning stage,
but also everything our boss is looking for.
We’d also consider what the email list subscribers actually want to read.
A note here: alignment doesn’t mean we give up our own perspective.
It lets us deviate thoughtfully, making considered choices about what works for us
and our particular audience.
So we might align our marketing email to what our boss and subscribers want, but leave in
a phrase or two that we believe achieves our broader goals.
Different kinds of revision may be necessary to achieve discovery and alignment.
First, content revision can involve adding things that are missing, removing things that
are repetitive, or refining things that aren’t accurate.
You also could focus on structural revisions.
Structure is the way that your piece fits together.
That might mean sequence, what happens in what order, like a creative writing narrative
where the zombies attack before the story starts.
Structure could also refer to the way you’ve organized an argument,
such as how you present the problem, evidence, and resolution of a research project.
When you’re drafting, you may be doing many things unconsciously.
But when you revise, you actively review your drafts to see why and how they’re working.
You look for the bones, muscles, and ligaments that join your writing together,
the phrases and paragraphs that make your core points.
You’re trying to evaluate if they can stand on their own.
Finally, revision isn’t a one-off re-reading of your work.
Like drafting, which is recursive and sometimes needs to be done more than once, it’s normal
to have to revise more than once.
You also might move backwards to drafting or another step in the process because of
what you’ve noticed during revision.
And that’s okay!
We do have to remember our deadlines and balance that pressure against the work that still
needs to be done.
It’s a reality of many writing tasks, this give and take.
To see our work in a new light, we need ways to approach our drafts reflectively.
Three techniques that may work include Self-Review, the Talk-To, and Peer Review.
Self-Review is when you look over your own work and try to see it anew.
Self-Review can be limited because we often get into a rut when it comes to how we see
our own work,
glazing over everything by saying, “seems fine,” or “it’s hopeless!”
Many people return to the guidelines for a project after the drafting step
in order to see if they might have missed
something that was important in the original goals.
Using tools like a checklist or a particular set of reflective questions can really help
us to side step our own particular biases,
try to see the work in a different way, and -- yes -- kill our darlings by letting go
of that joke that we’re proud of but doesn’t really fit with the rest of the piece.
The Talk-To is an example of a reflective tool that can help you self-review.
Composition scholar Kathleen Blake Yancey describes it in her book, "Reflection in the
Writing Classroom".
The idea is to read your text while adopting multiple perspectives on purpose, hoping to
generate new insights or make changes.
We start a Talk-To by imagining our text is the best thing we’ve ever read.
Then, we doubt that the text has any good qualities at all.
And we take notes on both these perspectives.
Holding these two opposing views in our minds can really help us land on an in-between view
that allows us to make useful changes.
We can continue the Talk-To by thinking about what an expert
or a writing professor would think of the text.
Finally, we agree or disagree with this imaginary expert’s opinion and take notes describing
our thoughts from each mindset.
All these notes offer a ton of information to consider while revising,
and by using that information, we can emphasize strengths
and improve weaknesses as we revise.
To gain even more insight, we can turn to others.
Peer Review is one of the most popular ways to see our writing in a new light.
It’s done in all kinds of academic fields, as well as a lot of workplaces and among professional
writers and authors.
Peer review is when someone who is in a similar place to you - a coworker or fellow student,
for instance - reads your work and gives you feedback.
This feedback draws attention to things you might miss on your own, letting you glimpse
what others see in your work.
In peer review, you can ask the reviewer to read your work in a certain way.
At work, your co-worker may know the specific tone that your boss likes, and you could ask
them if they think it fits your boss’ expectations.
At school, you might have a complex assignment with many requirements,
and your peer could help you by checking off each requirement as they read.
You can ask a question or just ask for general thoughts from your reviewer.
However, there are limits to how much this process can help you.
There are peer reviewers who do unhelpful things,
like encouraging you with positive comments without helping you see
where your draft falls short.
Peer reviewers are also peers; they usually aren’t experts who have written endlessly
on this topic --
unless, of course, you’re also an expert who’s written endlessly on this topic.
Their feedback is valuable, but you can’t necessarily incorporate it all without questioning it.
All these strategies contribute insights to help us revise.
For a look at how revision might play out in real life, let’s see a Writer in Action.
Will works in social media marketing, and he’s creating a batch of tweets for his
employer, a major producer of stuffed marsupials.
He’s written his draft and wants to see it from a different perspective.
His coworker, who focuses on Facebook, reads the draft and suggests ways to make the tweets
a little longer and more in-depth, including more facts about koalas, wombats, and wallabies.
Will thinks about the suggestions, and realizes that a little bit more detail would be good.
But he doesn’t want his tweets to be as long as his co-workers’s Facebook posts,
which work under a different set of expectations.
This helps him balance discovery of a way to improve
with his alignment to the task at hand.
He gives himself a little break from working on the tweets to respond to some emails, and
then he comes back to them.
He pulls up a competitor’s twitter page, Mad4Marsupials,
and considers their most-favorited posts.
He compares them to his own posts as a form of self-review.
He realizes that he wants to use more varied language in some tweets, changing the content,
and he wants to move some of the most exciting statements to the beginning of each tweet,
shifting the structure.
He also realizes he should cut the #KOALATYtime at the end of every post.
In an earlier draft, he thought it’d be funny and memorable, but he’s ready to kill
his darlings for more cohesive content.
By the end of the day, he doesn’t make any kind of grammatical edits, because in the
course of revising, even some of his most promising tweets have changed a lot.
He’ll return to them the next morning to check for clarity and typos, but for today,
he’s happy with his revisions.
Will is a Writer in Action!
Being open to change is hard for a lot of us, but we need to do it in writing
and in life.
Having to review your work, make changes, and then do it again is pretty normal.
So consider review techniques that will help you gain a different perspective on your work
to improve it.
As you write, try to leave time so that you can actually make the changes you uncover
in this process.
That scary command “Kill your darlings” is a bit harsh, but being willing to let go
of even cherished turns of phrase to make room for better writing
is essential to our improvement.
Tune in next time where we’ll brush up on our editing skills and work to remove any
barriers between our intended meaning and our readers’ understanding of our work.
No red pen required!
Thanks for watching Study Hall: Composition, which is produced by Arizona State University
and the Crash Course team at Complexly.
If you liked this video and want to keep learning with us here in Study Hall, be sure to subscribe.
You can learn more about ASU and the videos produced by Crash Course
in the links in the description.
See you next time!