The linked chapters here cover some of the most important aspects of writing—what's more important than the information you put in a document, how you organize it, how you link it all up together? Writing teachers tend not to do much with this sort of stuff in their classrooms because it's just plain old hard and tedious. Yet, if we were to find a way to make these revision concepts and techniques easier (or even fun?) to learn, practice, and apply, we might have achieved one of the most important breakthroughs in the teaching of writing.
When you look at all these powerful ways you can review (looking for potential problems) and then revise (fixing those problems), you're likely to be put off by how tedious and time-consuming it is. This stuff can become second nature rather quickly though. If you spend some time analyzing writing in the ways outlined in these chapters, the way you write and the way you review what you write will change. You'll start operating—and not even be fully aware of it—with these ideas in mind.
Specifically, this chapter covers these paragraph- and higher-level elements:
- Overview of structure-level revision
- Contents
- Structure
- Organization
- Topic sentences and overviews
- Transitions
This next chapter covers these sentence-style problems: