Hello. Before the revision strategy, a confession. I have been in a bit of a muddle lately. I “turned off” the news two days ago—tossed the email updates unread, and stopped checking news sources online or Johns Hopkins statistics. I think it did me some good to take a break. For example, I noticed I’d miss-numbered the assignments and fixed that. I slept better last night.

“Read the news” used to be my parting advice to graduating high school students. I would hand out a page with lists of other books similar to the ones we’d read (if you liked X you might want to read Y). On the other side was a reminder that if they were not yet they soon would be voting. They would be off to college in a city far larger than the little rural community where they’d attended school. They should know what was going on in the world. I provided a list of newspapers available online. I included conservative news sites and more liberal ones. I urged them to read both.

All of that is still good advice.

This particular assignment is the flip side of engagement with the world. Writing an idyll is a kind of meditation on a personal happy place, and if you can hold it in your mind clearly enough to write it down, you can possess and inhabit it whenever you like. That’s a good thing.

Your required revision:

Your idyll has lovely and personally meaningful moments, but so far (probably) remains largely unexamined. Do more than mere line editing for errors—try serious revision. 

NOTE: If you typed this on your computer, make a duplicate to revise, or print it off and retype from the hard copy. Either way save two versions. 

In order to re-envision your own words, do two things: 

1. 1. Move a passage from the end of your essay to the very beginning. Take the last paragraph or eight lines, or hundred words—the last bit of your essay, what you thought of as the conclusion. It’s nice when someone else marks this out for you. The goal is to work through the end of your essay to a powerful sensory image. End with an image, not an idea.
   2. Then change the point of view from first person (the I voice) to third person and the verb tense from past tense to present or present tense to past. These changes will alter every single sentence. That’s deliberate. Change anything else that occurs to you as you revise.

And also edit meticulously:

• • cut all second person POV (no “you” no “your” etc.) and the near-archaic “one”
  • cut the meaningless filler words such as: very, nice, beautiful, seems, such, so, etc.
  • cut et cetera (etc.); cut “I can smell…” and get to it; in fact, cut to the chase—
  • don’t “imagine” or tell about it—show; find and change passive voice to active voice; change weak verbs to strong ones (climbed to scrambled, walked slowly to crept)
  • read your essay aloud and if you stumble, there’s something wrong—fix it

You probably won’t like making these changes. It’s work, and this piece is about pleasure, but it’s likely going to make your idyll work better on the page. You’ll have to trust me about that.

Maybe one student in thirty preferred the original version. If you are that one person in thirty, the process may still provide further detail or clarity. Give it a try. No one is checking unless you are kind enough to paste your idyll, or even part of it, into a comment. I would love that.

This assignment was the one most commonly chosen for students’ portfolios at the end of the year as Writer’s Choice. Real Life Problems came in second. Students could revise work further, and occasionally did. One year a student told me she chose her idyll because it was the worst thing she’d written all year and she wanted to make it better. I immediately said she’d not written anything bad, but she pulled out the original and it was weak. The later version was lovely. Revision is a marvelous thing.