Rewriting is a difficult but rewarding process.  The first draft, often painful and time consuming, is never good enough.  This post is about why we find it hard to rewrite and some strategies for the second pass.

• ‘It’s a waste of time’

Reworking a piece can feel like going backwards, not forward. Cutting and changing is tough. I’m reluctant to change something I’ve worked so hard to produce. Recognize that the work you’ve done in the first draft reflects your first attempt to present the content.  The second draft shows how you refined and improved it. Often it helps me to have someone else point out where my meaning is not clear.

• ‘I’ll lose key ideas’

There is a legitimate fear: that the rewrite will lose something.  This can be a problem if you are not careful. However, most people find that several cuts or reworkings are necessary. When we do our first draft we tend to duplicate ideas we are interested in. Conversely, we do not work hard enough to clarify points that already seem clear to us. A good rewrite brings greater flow and coherency to the draft.

• ‘It’s not as interesting as doing the first draft’

I always prefer doing a first draft. Words seem so much more exciting when they appear on an empty screen. Rewriting doesn’t have the buzz of doing the first draft, of seeing words on a subject appear on the screen or the page. To stay interested in the second draft, step outside yourself, and imagine you are reading your work for the first time. Can  you make it simpler?  Connect ideas more smoothly? Give better examples?

• ‘It’s tedious!’

Rewriting does take patience; but if you go steadily then you can get faster. I find doing as much as possible in one pass helps me be more consistent. A good way to improve your consistency is the Search and Replace function of Word. ( ‘Ctrl +H’).  This allows you to find every time a particular word or phrase comes up. The spellchecker function ( F7) is essential for catching problems with spelling and formatting.

A piece of dull stone becomes a vivid, sparkling diamond by lots of careful applications of the cutter. In the same way, lots of small careful changes to your first draft can turn it into a high quality piece of writing. The process is not glamorous, but the end result is something special.