Almost nobody writes a good first draft. Experienced writers are not people who get it right the first time; they are people who expect to revise and know how to do it. This level treats revision as a skill with its own methods, from rethinking the whole piece down to catching a missing comma.

Three layers of work

It helps to separate three kinds of work. Revision means re-seeing the whole piece: Is the purpose clear? Does the argument hold up? Is the structure right for the reader? Editing works on sentences and words: clarity, length, word choice and flow. Proofreading fixes surface errors: spelling, punctuation, typos and formatting. In short, revising rethinks content, while proofreading fixes typos and other surface slips.

The order matters. Work from the top down, big problems before small ones, because polished sentences may be cut anyway when the structure changes. Time spent perfecting the wording of a paragraph that turns out not to belong is time lost. Writing tutors often call the big issues higher-order concerns and the small ones lower-order concerns, and they generally address them in that order.

Getting distance

The hardest part of revising your own work is that you know what you meant, so your mind reads the intended text instead of the actual one. Distance helps. The Roman poet Horace, in his verse letter on the art of poetry, written around the second decade BC, advised aspiring writers to hold a finished work back for years before publishing it. He suggested nine. Few deadlines allow that, but even a night's sleep lets you return to a draft as something closer to a stranger. A change of format helps too: printing the draft, changing the font or reading it on a different screen can make familiar words look new.

Another tool is to read the draft aloud, because the ear catches clumsy rhythm and missing words that the eye glides past. If you stumble while reading a sentence, a reader will stumble too. If you run out of breath, the sentence is probably too long or too tangled.

Cutting

Most drafts are longer than they need to be. A common pattern is throat-clearing: opening sentences that delay the actual point. "In today's world, communication is more important than ever" could open almost any essay, which is a sign it says nothing about this one. Often a draft's real beginning is its second or third paragraph. Try deleting the first one and see whether anything is lost.

For each sentence, ask whether the reader would miss it. Repetition that helps a reader follow an argument earns its place; repetition that comes from not trusting the reader does not. Cutting is painful because every sentence cost effort. But as Pascal's apology in the first level suggests, every bit of effort the writer spends cutting is effort the reader no longer has to spend.

Using readers

The best test of a draft is a real reader. Vague questions get vague answers: "Is it good?" usually produces "Yeah, it's fine." Specific questions work better, and one of the most useful is "What do you think my main point is?" If the reader's answer does not match yours, the draft has not yet done its job, however polished the sentences are. Other good questions: Where did you get confused? Where did you start skimming? What objection came to mind?

Proofreading

Proofreading comes last and calls for slowing down. Spell checkers help, but a spell checker misses real words used wrongly, such as "their" for "there," "form" for "from" or "trail" for "trial." Reading slowly, line by line, from a printout or aloud, catches what software cannot. Check names, numbers and dates against their sources; these are the errors readers notice and remember.

Worked example: a cover letter

Sam drafts a cover letter for a job at a food bank. The first paragraph says he is "a passionate, hardworking team player who has always wanted to make a difference." Revision starts at the top: is the purpose clear? He wants an interview for a volunteer coordinator role, but the letter never names the job. He puts the job title in the first sentence and cuts the throat-clearing.

Next, structure. His strongest qualification, two years scheduling volunteers for a youth soccer league, is buried in paragraph three, so he moves it up. Then editing: "I was responsible for the coordination of schedules" becomes "I scheduled 40 volunteers each week," which undoes a nominalization and adds a concrete number. He reads the letter aloud, finds a sentence he cannot say in one breath and splits it in two. Finally he proofreads and catches that he misspelled the organization's name, the one error the hiring manager would have been certain to notice.

A friend reads the result and is asked the key question. Her answer: "Sam has done this exact work before and does it well." That is the point he wanted to make, and the letter is ready to send.