Seven months later, King gave another revision of the speech to a gathering of political and spiritual leaders,

Among these useful interventions are participation in a lively revision culture and an interactive and social writing process such as talking over drafts—soliciting feedback from instructors and classmates. Extending the modern definition of writing more broadly to composing in any medium, revision is as bound to writing as breathing is to living.

work-in-progress, that they just don’t have time for all this revision today. But this critique echoes the point that writing is social and responsive to its readers. Writing is almost always meant to be read and responded to, not hoarded away.

The more writers push through chaos to get to the good stuff, the more they revise. The more writers revise, whether that be the keystrokes they sweat in front of a blinking, demanding cursor or the unofficial revising they do in our heads when they’re showering or driving or running, the more the ideal reader becomes a part of their craft and muscle memory, of who they are as writers, so at some point they may not know where the writing stops and the revision begins.

Effective revising isn’t making changes for the sake of change, but instead making smarter changes.

Anne Lamott calls “shitty first drafts” and all the ones that follow, the revision of a tenth and a thirteenth and a twenty-third draft. I show a YouTube video by Tim Weninger, a computer scientist and engineer at the University of Notre Dame. In the video, Weninger stitches together his revisions of a research paper. In my class, we play a game, guessing how many revisions Weninger did. The answer—463!

writers need revision because revision is not a discrete step. Revision is not the thing writers do when they’re done writing. Revision is the writing.

The fantasy that good writers summon forth beautiful, lean, yet intricate sentences onto a page without sweating is an unhealthy fiction, and it is wrong.

Writing developed not from speech but out of a need to represent numbers

the author’s voice is always a fabrication—a fiction—in the mind of the reader.

writing more accurately—not as a series of individual disruptions, but as a continual integration of knowledge and a way of making sense of the world.

Not much—except, perhaps, a clumsy metaphor that gets in the way of more accurate descriptions of a reader’s response. Conversely, letting go of the author’s voice turns writers’ and writing teachers’ attention toward more important aspects of learning to write.

Removing writing from the constraints of a single author’s voice

practical issues like the ability to make and support a claim, the ability to select and ethically represent evidence and experience, or the ability to write in a way that readers might recognize as important.

writing is some kind of divined gift, talent, or genetic trait that some people have and others do not. Removing this obstacle to writing helps people see writing as not only important to their lives, but also an ability that is learnable, teachable, and can grow with practice.

In other words, any voice of a text is contingent upon the particular ways a reader might apply emphasis to certain ideas, prioritize certain linguistic devices, and make inferences about an author’s motives, intents, or aims—all at the expense of other ideas, devices, or aims.

Using the author’s words, the reader weaves together an interpretation based on the reader’s own previous experience

You would likely interpret this letter differently depending on what you know about its author.

Reading is itself a constructive act—quite literally, reading is meaning making.

That shorthand also prevents us from thinking and talking about writing as its own form of communication.

Such work seems particularly difficult in an era of excessive information.

must spend time cultivating their voice.