In order to revise your writing well, you need to come as close as you can to reading it as if you hadn’t written it. Reading it aloud helps. But just as important is really watching and listening as you read it. You need to try to see and hear what you have just written as if someone else had written it. This is not an easy thing to do, but it can be done, and it gets easier with practice. But it doesn’t just take care of itself.
Most of us tend to feel a little defensive about our writing. And if it is new writing, writing that will be evaluated by others, writing that isn’t finished yet, we will probably feel more defensive. Most of us experience some of the Cognitive Distortions, to a degree, when we are writing. I may tend to personalize my writing, to see it as an extension of myself. Or I may overgeneralize about its flaws or virtues and use a mental filter. This mental filter can be either positive or negative: I can filter out either what is good about the writing or what is flawed about it. The specific form in which we distort our view of our own writing varies with each of us. But the tendency to distort is normal.
Sometimes, when you read a draft that you have recently written, you will be unable to imagine it any other way, unable to think about changes, locked in to the way it is. Other times it may seem completely hopeless, and it will seem that the only possible thing to do is to start over from scratch on a completely new topic. Both of these responses are usually mistaken.
Your first reaction to your writing is almost always based on your automatic thoughts. In fact, another way of describing the difficulty you have seeing what you really wrote is that you are reading your essay at an experiential level and are incapable of reflecting on it. Your goal is to think reflectively about what you have written. In order to do that, you want to be able to see it as if you were someone else, who had no personal interest in the writing other than what the words on the page could create. You also want to think about the writing from an analytical point of view. To do this, three techniques can be useful.
1. Read your essay from the perspective of someone who comes to your essay with no interest in your topic. If you have chosen your topic well, it is something you care about. One way to get a different perspective on what you have written is to try to assume that you are a reader who does not have a prior interest in the topic. When I write a first draft I am often writing to myself. I don’t bother to repeat what I already know; I try to get where I’m going. What I am most often likely to leave out of a first draft, therefore, is the material that will motivate readers to care, to take an interest in what I’m saying. I can see these omissions only if I try to see the essay through the eyes of a reader who doesn’t share my interests. Could a reader respond to your essay not so much with agreement or disagreement as with a big "So what?" Try to read your essay with a "So what?" attitude in order to find out what you need to do to interest and motivate those readers who don’t think as you do.
2. Read the essay from the perspective of someone who doubts what you are saying. Don’t misunderstand what I mean by "doubt." I’m not saying that you should necessarily try to assume the perspective of someone who strongly disagrees with what you have to say. Not knowing is also a form of doubt. The doubting reader might hold different opinions than you do or might simply be uninformed about the subject of your essay.
3. Get honest readers to read your essay and try to really understand their responses. The first two techniques above are ways of pretending that you are not conditioned by the automatic thoughts that are distinctive to you, of pretending to have another perspective. But pretending isn’t the only way to do this. Other people don’t have to pretend not to be you; they really aren’t. So have some people read your essay and give you feedback. There are two things about this suggestion that are sometimes hard to do. The first is to get people to give you their honest reaction. People don’t usually want to offend you. If their reaction to your essay is boredom or disinterest, they might well conceal the fact. Even if they disagree with you, they might soft-peddle their own views. That is no service to you, but it is human nature. The other thing that’s hard to do is to take real feedback seriously. When faced with real criticism, it’s very easy to fall back into personification and blame, identifying with your writing and blaming the critic. If you can recognize the potential value of responses from real readers, however, you will mine them for all they’re worth. The reader who completely misunderstands what you are saying is often the best possible source of information about how to improve your essay. I’ve discussed some of the ways of handling these problems in Thinking About Peer Review. If you make a real effort to understand how your readers think about what you are saying, it will almost always lead you to improve your writing.
Copyright © 2000 by John Tagg
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Palomar College
jtagg@palomar.edu