Revising By Joseph Harris Summary

The title of this article is Revising is by Joseph Harris, a professor who also teaches some type of academic writing related class. This particular chapter in “Inventing Argument” was taken from his book called “Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts”. This book was published on July 15, 2006. In this chapter Harris takes a strong stance in regard to revising. He believes that skill of revising academic pieces is over looked and that it is not simply a means of cleaning up or correcting grammar but a process of redeveloping and refining your old ideas into better ones. Harris shares multiple reason on why he thinks revising is looked at wrongly. Harris says “one-draft view writing is reinforced by most movie and TV depictions of writers
Harrison states that It is rarely that you see true revisions done to academic pieces of writing. That the confusion between editing and revising has been engrained into American culture. Harrison believes that one of the only places where you could trace the progress of an academic essay is in a “…university writing course.” (Paragraph 4). Then Harris goes into distinguishing between editing and revising. Then gives strong strategies of how to revise in detail. To start off Harris goes into detail about three things that make up the process of academic writing. The three stages he list is drafting, revising and editing. Harris says, “The three form an intuitive sequence: First you move from ideas to words on the screen or page; next you consider and rework what you’ve written, often with the help of responses from readers; finally, you edit, design and format your final document.” (Paragraph 6). Then Mr. Harris says the hardest of the three to understand is what he calls the “invention” or the drafting