11
Dec

Writing critique service



Writing critique service. Where the leverage in quick revising comes from stepping out of your skin and being someone else, the leverage in thorough revising comes from time. Not just work time, but putting-it-away-and forgetting-about-it time. What you can accomplish in three hours of wrestling with your draft can be accomplished in one hour -- and a much less frustrating hour, too -- if you first set it aside for a day or two. Indeed, there are some improvements you can never achieve through wrestling alone, such as a fresh conception of your material. Often you can only find a new shape for your piece if you take a vacation -- a time for forgetting, for preconscious work, for letting it get bumped out of shape by an experience from an entirely different part of your life. Writing critique service. So make sure that at least on two occasions during the thorough revising process you put your writing aside long enough to forget about it -- a couple of days or better yet a couple of weeks: once during the first half when you are hammering out and organizing the thing as a whole and once during the second half when you are cleaning up and polishing and paying more attention to details of language.
Writing critique service. First step in thorough revising: if this piece is intended for an audience, get your readers and purpose clearly in mind. Just as with quick revising or any revising, you must now keep your audience and purpose clearly in mind, especially if you allowed yourself to ignore them while you were getting words on paper. There is no such thing as good-writing -in-general. You must make it good for this purpose with this audience. Next, read over what you've written and mark the important bits (just as in quick revising).Next, find your main point or center of gravity. This is the same step as in quick revising, but this time you don't take No for an answer as you sometimes had to do when you were revising in a hurry. Writing critique service. Sometimes, of course, you knew precisely what your main point or focus was even before you started writing: the whole reason for sitting down to write in the first place was to focus on exactly that one thing which you had already formulated in your head. (But don't hold too tenaciously to it. The process of writing will often lead you to better things.)But if you haven't found your main point during the writing process, now you must demand it. This is often a crucial, delicate, frustrating process. You have lots of good stuff, but as you turn it over and over, you can't find the center, the main point, the one thing that sums it all up. You are trying to wrestle a powerful snake into a bottle. It writhes and writhes and you can't get control over it. You have two main options, putting it aside and wrestling some more. Writing critique service. Putting it aside for a couple of days is easiest and best. The main point will often come perfectly clear to you all by itself, as you are walking around doing something entirely different or else when you sit down again after your vacation. Your mind will chew on the problem by itself while you are supposedly ignoring it. But if that doesn't work, you'll just have to wrestle some more with that snake. Indeed, you probably get the most benefit from a vacation if you wrestle a bit first to get the problem fully permeated into your mind for your unconscious to work on it.