Revision Letter Overview

You will be asked to look at someone else's letters and provide feedback. You will receive a grade for this work because I want to give you incentives to learn how to respond to another person's writing. I want you to learn how to give a person ideas for revision that are useful and don't make the person feel overwhelmed. In the real world, if you can respond to others' writing in ways that actually give them ideas for how to improve written documents, you have a valuable skill.

Your overall goal is to write the person a letter that indicates the strengths and weaknesses of the letter packet and what the writer can do to improve on the strengths and eliminate the weaknesses. Your letter (or memo) should be at least a page in length, and should give the writer no more than three areas to improve. With each suggestion, you should point to specific places in the text where the writer could change things, and then give the writer ideas for what could improve that area. In order to come up with areas for improvement, work through the following steps.

Step One--Adequate focus/development

Read through the packet twice. The first time you read it, try to gather an overall sense of the writer's abilities to create the desired letters. Read through the packet a second time. At the bottom of each letter, indicate the main reasons given for the letter, and whether the letter/memo works for you.

When you've finished this step, stop and assess the overall effectiveness of the letters/memos. Are there some letters/memos that are stronger than others? If so, can you point to the effective parts in one letter in order to suggest ways to improve a letter that is not so strong? If you don't quite understand the author's agenda/purpose/message in one or several of the letters, or if you don't think that the author hasn't adequately thought out his or her message, then you probably want to write part of your revision suggestions regarding those letters that don't quite make sense yet.

If the person has an underdeveloped idea, I try to ask a lot of questions and give specific directions the paper might take. If you're working with unclear agendas, you need to tell the reader how the purpose/agenda is unclear. Go into the paper, and pull out the ideas. You might say...when I started reading your letter, I thought you were going to argue for this idea (and then quote the idea), but then you moved to this point (and then quote that point), finally you seemed to be arguing for (insert quote from the letter). I would then give the person several recommendations for how they could address this confusing agenda problem.

Step Two--Organization

In letter writing, organization must follow traditional formats. The author needs to have paragraphs! Each paragraph accomplishes a specific purpose. Does your packet have letters/memos that have clear introductions (that are generally pretty brief?)? Does your packet have letters/memos that have separated-by-idea body paragraphs? Do the letters/memos conclude? If they don't, you need to give the writer suggestions for making the paragraphs look more like letter/memo paragraphs. In addition, in the memos, you need to really assess layout/use of font/bold/bullets, etc. Memos should be read so that an employee can scan the information. Look at standard letter styles, and make sure the writer is following layout/organization expectations. If not, give the writer specific details for how to improve the texts by first quoting a small portion of what is written (or by summarizing the agenda of a paragraph) and then giving suggestions for how to focus the paragraph, or develop the body paragraphs (or whatever it is that you need to suggest). If it's just a matter of the actual visual look of the letter/memo, point out the differences between the examples of letters/memos and the writer's letters/memos

Look up the expectations for certain kinds of letters--and with each type, make sure that the writer has followed the recommendations. Have they placed the bad news in the right place, for example. If not, give them concrete suggestions for how to reshape the letter.

Step Three--evaluate the emphasis--reader centered (or you centered prose).

Take a look at the following paragraph from a letter:

"We are sorry to inform you that your services will not be needed at this time although we will probably need some more employees as it gets closer to spring and business starts to pick up. We would like it if you would apply again as it gets closer to spring. At that time, we will be looking for more employees."

In this text, the prose emphasizes the company (and the author) instead of the client (the audience). Have a look at the revision below and see how the emphasis shifts.

Thank you for submitting your application. Unfortunately, the fall is typically a slow season. In the spring, however, if you still remain interested, please contact us again, as your credentials are impressive.

Assess the prose in the writer's packet. Is it making these kinds of moves? If the text is all about the writer (and his or her company), point out this issue to the writer by indicating the sentences that need attention.

Step four--Assess the paragraph development

If you would benefit from the writer stopping after a claim and saying, for example...(and then providing information from a source that supports the claim) then you want to tell the writer exactly where the problems are, and what you would do to fix the problem. Once you've determined the need for evidence and that sort of development, try to characterize the kinds of paragraphs the writer uses. Do they all begin similarly? Do they all make a claim, and then give an example, and then conclude? Look up the various kinds of paragraph development available at the Purdue On-Line Writing Center (read through the page on paragraph development, and then see the list of types of paragraph development at the end of the page). If you see the writer is using the same strategy for each paragraph, point out the most obvious places for improvement. Give the writer ideas for how to change up the paragraphs.

Step five--Sentences/style

If the letter packet is excellent, or it is in the last stages of revision, and you've been focusing on minor suggestions thus far, then you want to include suggestions for polishing the text.

Transitions: First, assess the writer's transitions between ideas. Look at the paragraph that ends one section and the paragraph that begins another section. (Each paragraph might end a section, and so you would be looking at the ending and beginning of all the paragraphs.) Assess the person's cues for the reader. Does the reader know that one section is ending and another one beginning? If not, give the writer clear directions for where the conclusions need to be more explicit. Does the reader know when a new section begins? If not, tell the writer which beginnings need to be more clearly starting a new idea.

Sentence Structures/Variations: If you don't know about sentence structures, turn to your resources, and pull up the sentence play site. Learn to recognize the types of sentences you are seeing. Then return here, take a paragraph from the writer's letters, and look at the sentences. Are there variations in the sentence type? Are there variations in the sentence length? If you start to see a pattern, look at the next paragraph to see if that pattern continues. Tell the writer what kind of pattern you see, and give suggestions for how the writer might alter the text.

Grammar: If you notice grammar errors, don't change them. Just put an Xin the margin for that line, (for each grammar error) and an Xsp for any spelling error. If you fix the grammar errors for the person, you aren't doing the person a favor--because then you're just showing what you know how to do. Try to point out a patterned grammar error when you see it...but don't fix that pattern either. Just let the person know that there's an issue with a particular aspect of grammar.

Writing the Revision Letter to the author:

When you write the actual letter, you want to start by telling the writer what you liked about the packet, what the writer is doing well. Be concrete--give specific examples. In other words, give the writer some encouragement. Then move to the recommendations that you have. Your job is not to overwhelm the writer, but to give him or her a few areas for improvement in the text. Try to have a supportive tone, and give the writer information that makes it easy to see how to change the text. For example, you don't want to say: You have a poor grasp of how to write a letter, and I would have given up, but I had to do this assignment for my grade. Instead, you could say, I have a feeling that I'm going to like your letter packet once you've done revisions. Right now, I can see that you're very smart with tone. Your letter to President Grube was especially good, particularly because you wrote _____.

The more specific suggestions you can give, the better information the writer will have (and your specific comments will also make your letter longer!). So if you have a problem with the letter packet, you can say specifically what confused you or needed attention, actually quoting from the letters/memos. (Don't quote whole paragraphs! Give just enough information for a person to know what you're talking about. Then you can make specific suggestions, and even link to on-line resources.)

What you hand in:

You should make TWO copies of your revision letter, one to hand to me, and one to give to the author. The author is responsible for attaching your letter to the draft of his or her letter packet. If it were me, I would get an electronic version of the paper, and I would give my feedback on line, in the document (saving it under another name). In Word, under "Tools" you can activate a tracking device that will highlight all that you type into a document. I would make suggestions on the paper and in the letter; I would save the document, print out two copies, one for me and one for the author, and then I would forward my attached document to the author by e-mail.