In light of recently receiving our first essays back, the topic of revision has been rattling around in my head lately. It’s safe to say that most of the class did not expect to have the opportunity to revise and resubmit our essays. To be honest, originally I was not happy about the opportunity and was much more prepared to wash my hands of whatever I wrote and move on.
When I talked to someone about revising, they had a different approach. They said that I should be thankful for the chance to revise because it means that my writing will improve and I’ll likely get a better grade than I would have originally. While I acknowledged that this was probably true, the impatient, instant-gratification seeking devil on my shoulder wouldn’t shut up and I couldn’t help but think that it would be so much faster to write one draft and live with that result.
After I resigned myself to revising essay 1, I read the comments and suggestions Professor McCoy left. One comment seemed particularly useful. The concluding paragraph of the first draft contained a few sentences that would have served a much better purpose in the introduction of the essay and I was told that moving them to the beginning would be wise. This helped me further realize the amount of clarity that writing a draft can provide. Every time you finish an essay draft, you unearth an idea that will bring you a little bit closer to what you truly want to say. Each new idea will feel very profound and might seem like a good way to conclude the paper but odds are, the new revelation will work even better if it’s included closer to the beginning of the essay so that the reader understands exactly what you’re trying to convey. Unfortunately, this process is quite cyclical and the potential for constant improvement makes it impossible to write “the perfect paper.”
It’s not hard for a college student to quickly feel like a modern-day Sisyphus: rolling the boulder up the hill (writing a draft), momentarily reflecting at the top (being happy with the revision) and then watching it roll down and starting all over again (writing another draft). Page 79 of Interdisciplinarity says, “…the structuralist concern with narrative codes and systems can be seen as part of an ongoing attempt within literary studies to view texts as the products of a decipherable system…” The key word here is “ongoing.” With each edit and revision we can trim some of the noise and get to what we really want to say more effectively, but perfection isn’t something any writer will ever achieve. As we learned earlier in the semester, you can’t jump from A to Z. For now we’ll just have to keep our sights set on B and continue rolling the boulder up the mountain.