[MUSIC PLAYING] Hi, everyone. I'm Mackenzie. And today we're learning about Introduction to Revision. Do you have a hard time figuring out exactly how to express your ideas? In this tutorial, we'll learn about revision and the writing process, and we'll discuss the importance of revision.
We are going to be discussing the revising stage of the writing process. Keep in mind that the writing process is a set of eight steps that we follow to complete a piece of writing from beginning to end. Those eight steps are brainstorming, prewriting, creating a thesis, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading. We're going to focus on the revising stage.
When I say revising or revision, what I'm talking about is revisioning or rethinking the ideas that support, and the organization that we've included, in our writing. We're trying to decide if we have expressed our ideas clearly enough and if they truly are the ideas that we want represented in our writing. We're thinking critically about what we've written, what it means, and if that's what we want our writing to say. We have to keep in mind that revising is not the same as editing.
The editing stage in the writing process is when we change the way that the writing sounds. We change the style or the voice of the writing. We change our phrasing and our word choice. That's not revision. Revision also is not proofreading. Proofreading is the stage in the writing process when we change small grammatical, spelling, punctuation, mechanics, formatting errors. That's not what I mean when I say revision.
Revision is when we rewrite our ideas so that they most clearly represent what we want communicated to the reader. Because revising is such an important step in the writing process, it's important that you leave plenty of time for revision. It's going to be one step that you for sure want to revisit when you're working through the writing process.
Some writers may have dozens of drafts of the same paper. They've rewritten the paper dozens of times because, each time, it didn't exactly say what they wanted for it to say. The ideas weren't expressed exactly how they had intended for them to have been expressed in the writing. It's OK to have many drafts of your paper. You're trying to revise in such a way that the paper eventually says exactly what you want it to say. That's what the revising process is all about.
Now that we know what revision is, let's discuss the importance of revision. Revision is important because it gives the writer time to step back and reflect on what he or she has written. It gives the writer an opportunity to improve the writing, to think critically about it, and decide how to strengthen what he or she has written. We assess the writing. We try to figure out if there's a better way to write our ideas. When we use revision, we have to think of it as looking at the big picture of a piece of writing. We're evaluating the entire piece of writing and then looking at smaller parts of the writing.
We're looking at the thesis, and we're trying to decide if what we've written supports the thesis. We're looking at each of our paragraphs to make sure that they're in line with the thesis and that they match one another. We're looking at the support we have given in our paragraphs to make sure that it relates back to the paragraph topic and to the thesis. It's important to realize that, when we use the revision stage, we're going to revise several times. That helps us to come up with the most clear, effective, efficient writing possible.
It also helps us to avoid writer's block. If you continue to rewrite things, you generate more ideas about how to say those particular ideas. Experienced writers know that they will probably revisit the revision stage several times before their writing is as readable, convincible, interesting as possible. That's why the revision stage is so important and why writers need to leave ample time to complete this stage of the writing process.
In this tutorial, we discussed revision and the writing process, and we learned about the importance of revision. Find a way to clearly express your ideas. I'm Mackenzie. Thanks for listening.