Revise in the Order You Will Be Read: Advice to Students on Examining Their Own Drafts

by The Academic Supervisor, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Before I give any advice I should say what field it belongs to, because advice that suits a laboratory report can do harm to a history essay. What follows concerns argued academic writing in any discipline: the essay, the dissertation chapter, the thesis, the paper written for a seminar. The standards differ between the sciences, the humanities, the social sciences and law, and I will say where they differ. The order of operations does not differ, and the order of operations is my subject.

Here is the claim, and you are entitled to disagree with it. Most students revise their drafts in the wrong order. They work on sentences first, because sentences are what they can see, and they reach the argument last or never. An examiner reads in the opposite order: first what the work claims, then whether its structure carries the claim, then whether the evidence supports it, then whether the writer knows the field, and only then the prose. The most useful single habit a student can acquire is to revise in the order in which they will be read.

That is advice about procedure, and it may sound smaller than advice about brilliance or originality. It is not smaller. A draft revised in the wrong order can be polished for a week and come back with the same verdict it would have received on the first day.

1. What the evidence says about how students revise

The claim rests on more than my experience of drafts. In 1980 Nancy Sommers published a comparison of the revision practices of twenty university students and twenty experienced adult writers ("Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers", College Composition and Communication 31, no. 4). Her finding, put briefly, was that the students treated revision largely as a matter of rewording: they changed words and phrases, cut repetition, and left the shape of the piece as it was. The experienced writers described revision differently. For them it was the stage at which they found the form of their argument, and they were willing to change the whole to get it.

That study is old and small, and I do not ask it to carry more than it can. It describes a difference; it does not prove that the students would have written better essays had they revised as the experienced writers did. But it matches what any supervisor sees on the second draft of an undergraduate essay. The commas are better. The thesis, if there was none, is still missing.

The reason is not laziness. The sentence is the unit you can see. You can read a sentence and know whether you like it. You cannot read an argument in the same way, because an argument is spread across twenty pages and exists only in its relations: this claim supports that one, this section answers that objection. To see it you have to stand back from the page, and that is uncomfortable, because what you see from there may be that the essay has to be rebuilt.

2. First: find out what your draft actually argues

Do this before anything else, and let the draft settle it, not your memory of what you meant.

Close the file. On a separate sheet, write one sentence that states what the draft argues. Then open the file and find the sentence in the draft that says this. Two things can go wrong, and both are informative.

The first is that you cannot write the sentence. You know what the essay is about, but when you try to say what it claims, you produce a topic: "This essay is about the role of the press in the 1832 Reform Act." A topic is not a claim. Nor is a question ("What was the role of the press?"), nor an observation ("The press played an important role"), nor a summary of contents ("This essay will examine the press, the petitions and the riots"). Each of these describes a subject. None of them can be disagreed with. Booth, Colomb and Williams, in The Craft of Research, lead the student from a topic to a question and from a question to a claim, and that sequence is the right place to begin. Here is the test I use: could a reasonable scholar in your field disagree with your sentence? If not, you have not yet found your thesis, and no amount of work on the prose will supply it.

The second thing that can go wrong is subtler. You write the sentence easily, open the draft, and the draft says something else. You meant to argue that the press drove reform. The draft, read as it stands, argues that the press reported a reform that other forces drove: every piece of evidence you assembled points that way, and your conclusion quietly concedes it. This is common, and it is not a disaster. It is the most valuable discovery you can make about your own draft. The draft has done some thinking you did not notice yourself doing. Decide which argument you are making, and then make the whole essay make it.

Discipline changes the form of the claim, not the need for one. In the sciences it is a hypothesis and what the results show about it. In the social sciences it is the answer to a research question, and the contribution that answer makes. In law it is a proposition supported by authority and distinguished from the cases against it. In the humanities it is an interpretation that another reader could reject. A student who writes a "literature review" in any field still owes the reader a claim: what the literature, taken together, shows, and where it fails.

3. Second: find where the claim is stated, and give the page number

Once you have the sentence, ask where in the draft it first appears. Write down the page.

If the answer is page one, good. If the answer is the last paragraph, you have a common problem with a known cause. Many students write their way toward their argument and arrive at it in the conclusion. That is a legitimate way to draft, because writing is one of the ways in which we find out what we think. But it is a poor way to present, because your reader has spent the whole essay not knowing what the evidence was for. The examiner will reach the conclusion, find the thesis, and conclude that you found it too late to build the essay on it. They will usually be right.

The repair is yours to make, and it is larger than moving one sentence. When the thesis moves to the beginning, every section must now be read as serving it, and some sections will turn out not to.

4. Third: give every section a job

Take the draft and, beside each section or each paragraph, write in the margin one short phrase that says what it does for the claim. Not what it is about: what it does. "Establishes that circulation figures rose." "Answers the objection that the petitions came first." "Defines the term used in section four."

Some paragraphs will resist the exercise. You will find yourself writing "background" or "context", or nothing at all. Look hard at those. Background is sometimes necessary, but only as much of it as the argument uses. A paragraph that the argument does not use is not neutral. It costs the reader attention and suggests to the examiner that you are not sure what your argument needs. Cutting work you laboured over is painful, and it is also the clearest sign of a writer who knows what they are arguing.

Then read the phrases in order, without the essay. They should form a sequence, each step following from the one before. If two of them could be swapped without loss, the order may not be doing any work. If there is a jump between two of them that a sceptical reader would not make, a step is missing.

Umberto Eco, in How to Write a Thesis, advises the student to draft a table of contents early and to treat it as provisional: "A provisional table of contents will function as your work plan." The margin exercise is the same instrument used in the other direction. Eco's table is written before the draft, to plan it. Yours is extracted from the draft after the fact, to find out what plan it actually followed.

5. Fourth: ask whether your evidence is working

Students cite to support claims, and they also cite to look scholarly. The second habit is easy to fall into and easy to detect.

For each citation or example, try deleting it in your head. If the sentence still makes the same claim with the same force, the citation was decorative. It was attached to the sentence and did not support it. The examiner will notice, because examiners read with this question in mind.

Then ask two harder questions. Is the evidence enough for the size of the claim? If your thesis concerns the whole of the British press and your evidence is two newspapers, either the evidence must grow or the claim must shrink. Narrowing a claim to match the evidence is not a retreat. It is usually the point at which a vague essay becomes a precise one. Second: what is the strongest evidence against your argument, and where in the draft do you deal with it? If the honest answer is "nowhere", the examiner will supply the objection, and you will not be there to answer it.

What counts as evidence is where the fields differ most, and you should know your own field's standard before you apply this test. A historian's evidence is the archive and the printed source. A literary scholar's is the text, read closely. A social scientist's is data gathered by a stated method, and its limits. A lawyer's is authority: statute and case. Do not borrow a standard from a neighbouring field because it sounds more rigorous. Holding a reading of a poem to the standard of a statistical test is a mistake about what the reading is for.

6. Fifth: check that you are in the conversation, not standing next to it

A reference list shows what you have read. It does not show that you have understood what those writers argued, or where your own argument stands among theirs. Examiners look for the difference.

A quick test: find each place in your draft where you mention a scholar. Does the sentence say only that they wrote about your subject ("Smith has discussed the radical press")? Or does it say what they claimed, and what your argument does with that claim: agrees and extends it, qualifies it, or rejects it, and why? The first kind of sentence lists. The second engages. A draft made mostly of the first kind looks well read and argues with no one.

Then ask who is missing. Every field has two or three works on any well-studied question that an examiner will expect you to know. If you do not know which they are, ask your supervisor. That is a question a supervisor can answer in one sentence, and it may save you a chapter.

7. Last: the prose

Only now should you work on the sentences, and the standard here is clarity, not elegance. A complicated idea may need a complicated sentence. A simple idea that arrives in a complicated sentence is usually hiding something, and often what it hides is that you are not sure what you mean.

Three faults are worth looking for, because they are common, and each one conceals something.

The first is the sentence built from nouns that ought to be verbs: "the utilisation of", "the facilitation of", "the implementation of". The sociologist Howard Becker, in Writing for Social Scientists, is sharp about this kind of prose, and the diagnosis that matters is that such sentences hide who did what. When you find one, ask who acted, and what they did, and whether your sentence says so.

The second is the stacked hedge: "it could perhaps be argued that, in some respects, X may be...". If you think X, say X. If you are uncertain, say precisely what you are uncertain about and why. Four hedges in one sentence do not convey four degrees of caution. They suggest that the writer is avoiding the claim.

The third is the passive that hides an author: "it has been suggested that...". By whom? By the literature, in which case cite it; or by you, in which case claim it. The passive has a proper home in the methods section of a scientific paper, where the reader does not need to know who held the pipette. In an argument it too often hides the fact that the writer is the one making the claim.

Notice what all three faults have in common: each obscures who is claiming what. That is why prose comes last. Many problems that look like problems of style turn out, when you look closely, to be problems of argument. A writer who has found their thesis and given each section a job often finds that much of the fog in the sentences has already cleared.

8. Using your supervisor

Everything above is something you can do alone, and you should do it before you send a draft to anyone. But it also changes what you can ask of a supervisor.

Send the draft with a single sentence at the top: "I take this draft to argue that..." Then ask your supervisor to tell you, before they read your sentence or after, what they take it to argue. If the two sentences match, your meeting can be spent on evidence and literature. If they differ, the difference is the most important thing either of you will learn about the draft. Spend the meeting there.

Do not ask your supervisor to rewrite a paragraph for you, and be wary when one offers. A rewritten paragraph is better than yours, and you will learn less from it than from a sentence telling you what your paragraph fails to do. The rewritten version will also, quite often, make a slightly different claim from yours, and you may not notice the change until your examiner asks you to defend it.

When feedback arrives, sort it by the same order. A comment that your thesis is unclear outranks twenty comments on commas, however many more of the second kind there are. Address the structural comments first, even when the small ones are quicker to clear. Clearing them is satisfying, and that satisfaction can mislead you about how much of the work is done.

9. Two objections

"I find out what I think by writing. I cannot know my argument before I start." That is true for many good writers, and nothing above forbids it. The order I describe is the order of revision, not of drafting. Write in whatever order produces a draft. Then, once the draft exists, read it as the examiner will. The danger is not in discovering your argument late. It is in submitting the draft in which you discovered it, unchanged, as if the discovery were the essay.

"I do not have time to rebuild. The deadline is on Friday." Then rank. With three days you cannot do everything, so do the first things first. Find the claim and put it on the first page. Cut the section with no job. Answer the strongest objection in one paragraph. Leave the commas for the last hour. An essay with a clear thesis and some untidy sentences will usually be judged more kindly than a well-polished essay with no thesis, because the first has something to examine.

10. A procedure, in order

For the student who wants it as a list to pin above the desk:

1. Write, from memory, one sentence stating what your draft argues. Check that a reasonable scholar could disagree with it.
2. Find that sentence in the draft and write down its page. If the draft argues something different, decide which argument is yours.
3. Write in the margin what each section does for the claim. Cut or justify any section that has no job, and look for missing steps between the rest.
4. Delete each citation in your head. Strengthen the evidence or narrow the claim. Find the strongest objection and answer it.
5. For each scholar you mention, check that you say what they argued and what you do with it.
6. Only then work on the sentences, and look for the sentences that hide who is claiming what.

None of these steps asks you to be cleverer than you are. They ask you to read your own work as a stranger would: someone who has not heard your intentions and has only the pages in front of them. That is how your examiner will read it.

Works referred to

Booth, Wayne C., Gregory G. Colomb and Joseph M. Williams. The Craft of Research. University of Chicago Press (first edition 1995; later editions revised).

Becker, Howard S. Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article. University of Chicago Press (first edition 1986).

Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. MIT Press, 2015 (Italian original Come si fa una tesi di laurea, 1977).

Sommers, Nancy. "Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers." College Composition and Communication 31, no. 4 (December 1980): 378–388. ERIC record EJ240356: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ240356

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quārtum Nōnās Octōbrēs (4 October 2026), ā Supervīsōre Acadēmicō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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