The Revision Process 

Incorporating Instructor Comments

Your hard work this semester will culminate in the selections you include in your Final Portfolio, Essay 1 and two from Essays 2, 3, 4. By now, you have had benefit of feedback from classmates on your Peer Draft and more in depth suggestions for improving your essay on the Teacher's Draft. At this point, you are ready for even more substantial and effective revision, the key to success in the Portfolio System. But what does revision really mean? How should you incorporate your teacher's comments?

My writing is a process of rewriting, of going
back and changing and filling in"--Joan Didion. 

Because the best part of all, the absolutely most
delicious part, is finishing it and then doing it over. . . . 
rewrite a lot, over and over again, so that it looks like
I never did"--Toni Morrison. 

". . . the best reason for putting anything down on paper
is that one may then change it"--Bernard DeVoto 

Successful writers always revise their work, so revision will be an important activity in CAI Portfolio English 1010. In fact, the portfolio system of writing assessment rewards you for substantial and effective revision. 

As you perhaps already know, the word revise comes from the French revoir, which means to see again. When your teacher asks you to revise your writing, your teacher wants you to reconsider it from a fresh perspective and to make significant changes that will involve re-seeing and re-thinking "global" issues like purpose, thesis, audience, development, organization, and writer's tone and voice. Though important, simply cleaning up surface errors (misspellings, for example) is not revising (see "21 Most Common Errors"). Also, improving the effectiveness of your style, in terms of diction and sentence structure, while helping your overall presentation, does not address global issues. Your teacher will always ask that you do more than just correct mistakes. Your revision tasks may include rewriting entire sections of your essay, reordering paragraphs, or selecting another audience, which will also mean choosing different supporting material and language throughout the essay. Of course, you will also deal with sentence-level corrections, but remember this alone does not constitute revision. 

Now that you have a general idea of what revision means, how should you approach incorporating instructor comments? Your teacher will respond to your writing with an eye to its strengths and weaknesses. Once you receive your instructor's comments, whether on the individual essay's Teacher Feedback Sheet (see Portfolio p. 233) or on the Mid-term Portfolio Evaluation Form (see Portfolio p. 247), read them carefully to help you determine how to proceed to revise and, thus, improve your efforts for the Final Portfolio submission. The best way to read the Teacher's Feedback Sheet is to (1) read the teacher's general response first, (2) next, read the teacher's specific response to issues of purpose, audience, development, organization, and language usage, and (3) finally, read the teacher's comments on the margins of your paper. Be sure to ask your teacher about comments you do not understand. 

Much of your success as a writer in CAI Portfolio English 1010 will be determined by your ability to revise your writing effectively over the course of fifteen weeks of writing. Using the computer is particularly helpful because it simplifies moving around words, sentences, and even whole paragraphs with the "cut and paste" options in the "Edit" menu. You can also use the split screen option to view an existing draft in one portion of the screen as you make revisions on the draft in the other. Additionally, revision of organization is made easy by deleting all text except topic sentences to see 1) if, in fact, effective topic sentences are used and 2) if they are arranged in the most logical sequence possible. 

The Portfolio System recognizes that you are a developing writer who must learn the craft of revision; your teacher will guide you through these and other exercises to improve your revision skills Think of your teacher as your writing coach, take your teacher's suggestions for revision to heart, and remember that your best writing will always be a product of rewriting. 

Editing for the Portfolio

After you are satisfied that your revised essays contain effective global changes, you are ready for the next steps of portfolio readiness: (1) editing to improve your prose style and (2) editing to eliminate errors in grammar and mechanics. 

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