Great Tips on How to Rewrite a Text
If your aim is to write a text by rewriting it, you should be prepared to go over it several times. The following method is effective:
- Creating the first or initial draft: While you are writing your first draft, try to concentrate on putting your ideas into words. At this stage, you do not need to return and do any revision. As a matter of fact, you do not even need to re-read what you have put on paper so far unless you need to do so to get back on track.
- The review stage: Go back over the draft you have written and mark out any big problem areas that need to be looked at. It may be that some of the characters have to be renamed, that you have to do some research to get your facts correct, change the narrative to a significant extent, or re-order a few of the larger sections.
- Do some more rewriting: From the notes you made, rewrite your rough draft completely. Essentially, the purpose of this is to clean up your messy-looking first draft.
- Now do some revising: Read back through your work once more, making whatever changes are needed as you progress. Make the dialogue tighter, smoothen out the flow of sentences, check your choice of words, and improve your descriptions. You may want to focus your revisions e.g. one revision of dialogue, one just checking facts, another for improving descriptions, and so on.
- It is now time for editing: Most likely, you will have cleaned up the majority of technical mistakes as you were rewriting and revising, but you should use the editing process to focus on spelling, punctuation, sentence flow and structure, and grammar. If you are not familiar with all the rules of English grammar, you will need to look for a good guide and learn them.
- The final step is proofreading: Here, you just need to check for any irritating typographical and other stray errors.
Some of the above steps may have to be repeated. It is often recommended, for instance, that you keep proofreading your text until you absolutely cannot find any more typos or other errors. In an ideal situation, you will enlist the help of a professional editing service after you have done your part. Do not forget that, regardless of how often you go through a manuscript, a few inconsistencies and errors will almost always get through.
