Stylistic Revision: Maximizing Clarity and Directness
Purpose: The goal of Stylistic Revision is to concentrate on sentence construction in later revisions, focusing on concision and detail. It is designed to engage students with their essays on a sentence to sentence level that will enable them to write in a clear, concise, immediate style.
Description: This exercise should be helpful in the later drafting stages. Students will be required to pay close attention to language and to their closings. By this point, the students should have the bulk of their essays written and are therefore focused on revising and polishing their essays. The design of this exercise is to assist with sentence-by-sentence revision, thereby maximizing clarity and directness.
Suggested Time: 45 minutes
Procedure: this exercise has two parts:
Part I: Avoiding Passive Voice [Create passive voice handout with examples if you feel it is necessary.]
Pass out individual copies of “Another Fish Story” to students at the beginning of class. Ask them to take 10 minutes to read over it, underlining instances of passive voice and also any striking similes or metaphors.
Have a brief discussion about what they underlined, including a brief discussion of passive voice, using examples from the essay.
Students should pick a paragraph of their choice and rewrite with the knowledge taken from discussion (and their own) using active, immediate language.
Share with class!
Part II: Ending the Essay
Now discuss the closing paragraphs of the essay, describing what’s working, what they notice, what strikes them, what doesn’t, etc. Discuss ways to tighten the language, avoiding clichés and generalities. Also discuss how to close the essay without being conclusive, avoiding the traditional modes of restating what’s already been said, etc.
After discussion have students rewrite the last paragraph avoiding clichés, etc. implementing also what was discussed in Part I.
Share!
Have students implement this exercise in their own work for the next revision.
Additional Information: This exercise is a lesson in language, not in grammar.