AI.8 Revise And Polish Drafts Of The Essay

Drafting is easy; revising is where the real work begins.

The paragraphs which end Section AI.7 provide my essay’s first draft. A first draft is merely a manuscript’s beginning. Completing the manuscript requires multiple editing passes as I described in Chapter 4.

I worked through my essay several times in order to convert it from a first draft into a completed essay (Section AI.2). My initial editing passes had three basic goals: to correct any flags generated by my word processor; to clean up any writing I didn’t like or understand; and to make the manuscript as concise as possible. I typically only conduct one revising pass through a short manuscript per day; stepping away from the manuscript permits fresh eyes to detect new problems when revising continues.

Shortening the manuscript involved two general processes. First, I looked for phrases which I knew I could either shorten or remove. Second, I killed my darlings – I removed material I enjoyed adding earlier in the writing process, but which I recognized didn’t really work (Quiller-Couch, 1916).

I believe I successfully converted my first draft into a clearer, more concise manuscript. The first draft given in Section AI.7 contains 2331 words. In contrast, the final essay provided in Section AI.2 contains only 1676 words: a reduction of nearly 30%.

I used the Editor function in Microsoft word to further compare the essay’s first and final versions in order to assess my editing. The Editor function delivers several basic counts of objects (e.g., words, sentences), and averages of such counts (e.g., words per sentence).

The Editor function also delivers a few readability measures. Flesch Reading Ease measures readability using the average number of syllables per word and the average number of words per sentence. It uses a 100-point scale; as the score increases, more people can readily understand the manuscript. Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level uses syllables per word and words per sentence to create a score indicating a grade level. For instance, a score of 4 means a fourth grader can understand the manuscript. The Editor also determines the percentage of passive sentences in the document. Its algorithm defines a passive sentence as one in which the subject does not perform the action of the sentence’s verb; instead, the action of the verb is performed on the sentence’s subject.

Table AI-5 provides the statistics the Editor computed for the essay’s first and final versions. My editing did little to make the essay easier to understand for general readers; both versions have similar reading ease scores and grade level scores. However, the editing did make the final version shorter than the first draft, and probably punchier: the percentage of passive sentences in the final version is a third of the percentage found in first draft. I removed about five words from the average sentence. Given the essay’s topic is technical, I’m satisfied with my editing efforts.