Toolkit: Resources for Revision
It’s revision season, y’all!
It’s time to hunker down and do all those things the school year makes difficult to impossible. Or at least that’s what we tell ourselves, and what my client schedule reinforces.
I don’t know about you, but most everything coming across my desk right now is some form of revision — book and article R&Rs, responses to readers, new drafts after editor comments, you name it. Or maybe you’re just about done with revisions and are about to drop your manuscript off to your editor for feedback, the press for review, or even — if things are all aligned for you — the finished manuscript for production.
When authors send me their full manuscripts for edits, comments, or assessment (when they’re going to leave their big projects with me for a good few weeks), I remind them that this is a time for them to step away, take a break, let it go as it sits with me. It is counterproductive to work on it any more in the meantime. So maybe they could get some rest from writing?
That’s always my hope, but for most scholar-authors, this means turning to the pile of other writing, often waiting in different revision stages, for their time in the spotlight. I get it; I really do.
And so in the spirit of revision season (otherwise known as summer), I thought I’d give you a few of my favorite resources for ways to approach your revisions — from the large to the small.
When you’re thinking about the process of revision
I’ve mentioned William Germano’s On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts (University of Chicago Press, 2021) before in my posts, and it’s the writing book that I refer clients to the most, mainly because it is less about the specifics of writing than about writing (and revision) as a practice of opening up your ideas, argument, and text to readers in the most generous and enlivening way. This is a big-picture, developmental book interested in helping writers conceive of their work, in all stages of revision, in partnership with your eventual readers.
The book provides practical suggestions for going about strengthening your manuscript’s main elements — argumentation, architecture, audience, and the like —as well as end-of-chapter takeaways and next steps. What I find most useful in here is the general ethos that writing is a process of re-visioning the way that you can talk most effectively and most engagingly with your readers, using the material and knowledge you have at hand. It’s a generous book, and advocates for a generous relationship between authors and readers, where your revisions — in all their forms — are ultimately the gift you give. If you’re looking for a resource to make you feel better about revising itself, this is it. It might even inspire you to open that file and get going.
When you’re thinking about specific feedback or larger changes
If you have received reviewer, editor, or writing group feedback and aren’t sure how to interpret it or what to do in response, Pamela Haag’s Revise: The Scholar-Writer’s Essential Guide to Tweaking, Editing, and Perfecting Your Manuscript (Yale University Press, 2021) is a great resource. Written especially for scholarly writing, the book’s chapters cover common feedback like “Doesn’t Flow” and “Book Has No Through-Line.” Haag combines larger-picture discussions of what in the world comments like that actually mean with practical tips for how to revise in response. Each tip is numbered, and at the back of the book, they are listed in a “style audit,” making them easily searchable. If you aren’t feeling up to reading the book all the way through, you can go directly to that audit and look for issues you know you have or are struggling with, and that can help you pinpoint where you might want to start. Haag also provides helpful modeling in examples of real revised material. The combination of more conceptual discussions about these common feedback notes with such detailed, practical tips and strategies for revision makes this a great book to have with you as you break down what you might need to do and why.
When you’re thinking about your writing style
A text that approaches the stylistic elements and choices of writing accessible, clear, and often elegant prose for academics, Helen Sword’s Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard University Press, 2012) breaks down major elements of scholarly writing — such as voice, hooks, jargon, structure, titles, and sentences themselves — with plain conceptual discussion, practical suggestions, clear examples, breakout sections discussing other useful writing resources, and end-of-chapter exercises for you to apply. Sword’s book is based on extensive research about the writing needs and tics of scholarly communities, many of them social sciences and sciences. What she’s particularly interested in (and what is ultimately most helpful, I think) is how to write intellectually rigorous material for larger audiences, in and outside your discipline, and how not to get bogged down or limited by received “rules” in the process. If you want to think about how to improve the elements of your style at the conceptual and granular level, this is a great resource. And it’s readable, too!
When you’re looking for help that’s not in book form
Letitia Henville’s blog, Ask Dr. Editor, hosted by University Affairs (out of Canada), is a treasure trove of professionalization advice tailored to specific issues and questions. Many of its posts are oriented toward sciences and social sciences, which could be helpful if you’re not working with, or through, the humanities. Posts that might be useful when you’re thinking about revisions cover effective signposting, good titles for articles, strong conclusions, coherent and useful literature reviews, effective use of jargon, and — most directly relevant today — “How to revise and resubmit without despair.”
Manuscript Works, the website of Laura Portwood-Stacer (who has literally written the book on academic book proposals), has an archive of posts covering academic editing, primarily focused on books. One section, Writing & Revising Your Book, includes tips on introductions, acknowledgments, the dissertation to book process, and writing groups. This might be most directly useful: “10 Problems with Scholarly Book Manuscripts (and How to Fix Them).”
For more detailed help with citations, language, and the technical aspects of revision, here are a couple useful sources. The Chicago Manual of Style’s website keeps the actual CMoS behind a paywall (it’s very useful to have a subscription if you work in this style), but their blog CMOS Shop Talk is available and covers things like citing book reviews, citation minutiae, invisible endnotes, and capitalization and comma usage — and that’s just on the front page. Purdue OWL, while primarily geared toward students, is a perennial resource for writing, citation, and technical tips in many different style guides, particularly in their Online Writing Lab.
For help thinking about language and writing from a position of “awareness, equity, and liberation,” Alex Kapitan, the Radical Copyeditor, is a wonderful resource, with a blog that covers topics like trans-inclusiveness and queer awareness, harm reduction, and countering racism and Indigenous oppression in figurative, and literal, language use.
This a very selective list, of course, and reflects a few resources I turn to, limited by my own still-growing knowledge and awareness. I’d love to learn about more what you find helpful, especially from anti-oppressive standpoints and underrepresented communities (so, pretty much, less normative cis whiteness). Just as writing is not neutral and neither is editing, revising is not neutral, and this list of resources inherits my own limitations.
May you revise to your heart’s content and then stop
Hopefully these sources can give you tips that will help speed up your process and open up time for much-deserved fun, rest, and relaxation. Because, honestly, taking care of yourself is the fastest route to the effective, clear thinking that makes revisions possible — or at least, not tortuous.
So, get some rest and have some fun, if you can!
