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Introduction

When someone has thoughts or opinions that they think are worth sharing with the public, from the wide range of ways offered by our modern world to do it they, with a high probability, will choose writing. This method of conveying ideas has been present for centuries and is still the most popular technique. Writing gives an opportunity for expressing deep emotions as well as scientific facts to a range of readers from a general audience to a very specific group of experts and a well-organised, clear and effective piece of written work has influence and value. Writing also has a great advantage compared with, for example, speech : a written piece can be stored for, practically, an infinitely long period of time. This means that authors have the possibility to mould it as long as, and rethink it as many times as, they feel like and allow only the very final version, with which they are completely satisfied, to be released. They have the chance to revise the text. The aim of this paper is to clarify the notion and importance of revision and suggest some effective techniques.

Method

Revision has several forms and ways, almost as many as writers themselves. The common feature is the aim of the activity, which is not only the correction of the product but also the improvement of its content and, often, form. Today schools and publishers offer a wide range of courses and books dealing with this issue. This work is mainly based on my personal experience of attending a Writing and Research Skills course at Janus Pannonius University (JPU) of Pécs, Hungary during the spring semester of 1996-7 and coming across themes, topics, tasks and recommended reading materials related to revision. Among the supporting readings the one I found the most useful was Hubbard (1988 177-88).

Results and Discussion

Re-reading a finished work can help the author to identify several types of problems that otherwise would remain unrevealed. Hubbard calls this procedure "proofreading" :

"The very last changes you make in a piece of writing before it goes to its audience are generated within proofreading. The term comes from printing, where a 'proof' or test copy is made from the metal type before a print run starts. This test copy is used to make minor corrections at the last minute." 1

Once the "print" is set it is complicated and expensive to make corrections. Proofreading is the last check before the product is released.

The main point of re-reading is to spot inconsistence or incoherence in the text. Writing is usually a long process and so it is very difficult for the writers to look at their work as a whole. The main reason of this is that the creation of individual parts like introduction, conclusion or the insertion of citations are usually temporally separated from each other. But readers, since reading is much faster than writing, are going to have an impression of the piece as a whole and so spot the above mentioned errors more easily.

Reading through again might unveil, first of all, grammatical mistakes and bad sentence or paragraph structuring. If proofread their product, they practically take the part of their would-be audience, try to see it from their point of view.

"Being consistent throughout a long piece of writing is not easy, and if you are the writer you might find it almost impossible, for example, to use a technical term in the same way through ten pages or always to remember what you have assumed an audience knows about your subject. But other people can follow terms and assumptions much more easily because their memories are not clouded by their intentions." 2

Errors in consistence are not only stylistically disturbing but also distract the readers' attention from the essence or completely confuse them. They create an air of carelessness and leave a bad impression. If writers discover these, it will be possible for them to correct, and so improve the quality of their work. Another dangerous type of errors is the error of style. Wrongly chosen style (for example, using foul language or slang in a scientific essay or using foreign words in a children's cartoon) might also make the readers unwilling to continue reading.

While re-reading, authors may find that the work is not about the intended topic. They might find that they have been following wrong traces or their statements and claims are not clear enough for the readers to understand, or are not sufficiently supported. Sometimes the entire writing needs to be rethought, re-structured and perhaps even rewritten.

The major difficulty revising writers face is that they cannot get rid of their consciousness of their own intentions and thoughts. They can read again their product, but in vain, because, once they know what it should be about, they are probably going to see what they want to see without noticing errors.

"Revision literally means re-seeing, but the ways we re-see are the ways we see." 3

A sub-type of revision is to help to solve this problem, and it is tape-recording and playing back a finished work.

One specific task we, the students attending the above mentioned writing course at JPU, got was to tape-record one of our essays. It proved to be very useful from different aspects. First of all, playing the tape back helped us to hear our text from the point of view of an outsider and so get over the problem of "seeing what we want to see". The other advantage of recording and playing back was that it gave an even clearer review of errors of structure and coherence on the sentence, paragraph and text levels.

Conclusion

Apart from tape-recording and playing back there are, of course, several other, equally effective ways of revision. For instance, Hubbard mentions reading backwards (sentence by sentence) or reading imitating other persons' voices or using foreign accent.

"If you are working alone, read your revised and edited piece backwards, one sentence at a time. [...] Or read it in a strange accent, John Wayne, or Pee Wee Herman, or someone from another country." 4

Whichever method a writer selects the major goal remains the same : spot and correct errors of grammar, consistence or style.

"All these techniques [methods of revision] have the aim of making your writing seem strange to you [and so help to judge it more objectively]." 5

One should not save time by leaving out revision, however useless it sometimes may seem. If authors have time to compose they will probably have the time to rethink their ideas and look through their work again. It often takes just a few minutes' revising to find a tiny little slip that can ruin the work of, perhaps, weeks or months.