[THIS CHAPTER REQUIRES FURTHER EDITING]

Introduction

Whether you know it or not, you revise as you write. Even if you
produce a first draft and never come back to it, something tells
me you at least look back at the sentence you’re in the middle
of, and sometimes the sentences and paragraphs before that, so you know
whether your current thought actually follows on the previous one. Or
maybe one of your teachers made a point of telling you to write a rough
draft, put the paper away for a while, and come back to it; in that case,
you’re probably even more aware of revising. But I’ll also bet that even
within each of those sessions, you were in the middle of saying one thing
and thought of a better idea, or a better way of saying it—so you erased,
you went back to the middle or beginning of the line, and you restructured
it. The writing led to a better understanding, which led you to change
what you were writing. And that’s revision.
In this essay, I want to help you understand revision better. I want to
help you think through what you do with words and sentences, because
what we do within sentences we can also do with paragraphs, pages, and
even larger chunks of writing. Studies have shown that expert writers revise
on those large scales more than beginners do, so learning to think big is
part of how we grow our expertise as writers.
And the tool I recommend for seeing revision better is version history.
You may know it better as track changes, or (if you’re into computer pro-
gramming) diffs view, but the basic idea is this: (1) use digital tools to visi-
bly mark what’s changed in your writing from one moment to another; (2)
add a note that says what that change is meant to accomplish, or where it
gets you; (3) reread the notes later on.
Visibly Marked Changes
Before we can talk about what you’ll learn in studying your own version
histories, I want to make sure we’re all on the same page about what I’m
describing, and why I find these histories so interesting. Example 1 shows
a simple example of a diff, a comparison between two adjacent versions of
this document. In this case, I generated it with Google Docs, using the File
menu to select See Version History. But there are lots of tools you could
use; pretty much any word processor these days can compare files, and
most can compare versions within the same file. Leaving tool choice aside
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for now, let’s look at the diff together. You should recognize the context:
the sentence is taken from the second paragraph above.
Example 1: Substitution at the level of words
And studies have shown that expert writers revise on those large
scales more than beginners do, so learning to think big is part of
how you we grow your expertise as a writers.
Not earth-shattering, I know; just a slight shift in wording, from you to
we, from your to our. But a change doesn’t have to be massive to be mean-
ingful. What I meant to accomplish with the change in pronouns was to
change my sense of relationship to you as a reader: by including myself in
the group that’s growing, I signal that I’m still learning, too—including
by writing this essay and reflecting on my version history. That’s why I’m
drawing on examples from this piece, so you can see how I’m learning, and
what it gets me. True, I’m not exactly a novice, either: I’ve been publishing
and teaching writers for almost two decades; I do think about large-scale
changes and restructuring. But as this example shows, thinking about the
large scales doesn’t mean you stop fiddling with sentences and words as
you get more experience.
It might, though, mean you think more about how the small and the
large are related, and that’s one of the big things studying your version his-
tory can help you do. For example, when I think about my reason for that
small change above, you to we, it raises a question that applies to the essay
as a whole: what is my relationship with readers? And what follows if I’m
not separating myself from the lessons I’m trying to impart? For one thing,
my examples might shift from things other people have written about to
the things I have found concretely helpful, things that don’t depend on
already having a large revision repertoire. It might mean, in fact, spending
more time with the word-level edits we all make, and demonstrating how
they can themselves lead to high-level rethinking. And so, here we are: all
six paragraphs you just read are entirely new additions. Not a bad outcome
for a few small tweaks!
For the change in Example 1, the structure of the sentence stayed the
same: the main move was one of substitution in place, one pronoun for an-
other. But even within a single paragraph, structural changes are possible.
Example 2 shows a diff view from an earlier draft of this essay. I’d written
the paragraph in one order, then decided that the last sentence made a bet-
ter lead sentence—so I switched them around.
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Example 2. Reordering at the level of sentences
[…] it’s an experiment everyone can do: are your changes changing
as you study writing and get more focused practice and feedback?
But it’s not always easy, in the thick of the writing or after push-
ing through the thicket, to remember what turns you took, or
why; sometimes the new versions just replace what you’d done
before, whether figuratively in your memory or literally on your
hard drive. In this essay, I want to make the case for using version
control technology to help track and make visible what’s chang-
ing in the course of a writing project, so you can then assess how
“what changes” has changed in the course of a writing class. Be-
cause it’s not always easy, in the thick of the writing or after push-
ing through the thicket, to remember what turns you took, or
why; sometimes the new versions just replace what you’d done
before, whether figuratively in your memory or literally on your
hard drive.
Reordering to highlight main ideas or improve transitions is a strategy
worth knowing, if you don’t already. But there’s also another, related,
change in Example 2 that might be obscured by the movement of the full
sentence. Do you see it? Between the deleted version (struck through) and
the inserted version (underlined), the first word of the sentence changed.
In its original position, the idea that “it’s not always easy” was a contrast
with what came before, a turn, and so I wrote it “but”-first; within the
paragraph, though, the two ideas go together, so “but” became “because.”
Thinking through the reasoning here, we can develop a two-part revision
strategy: First, consider whether a position change makes sense; second, reassess
transitions in light of the new position.
As I said above, the small-scale strategies you can see in these diffs
are often worth trying at larger scales. So, knowing that you can reorder
sentences within a paragraph, you should start to realize you can reor-
der whole paragraphs, too. Example 3 shows the whole original paragraph
from Example 2 switching places with its neighbor:

Example 3. Reordering at the level of paragraphs
[…] to help in future writing projects, I’m more interested in what
strategies they used to revise – and in expanding the strategies
they have experience with.
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But it’s not always easy, in the thick of the writing or after push-
ing through the thicket, to remember what turns you took, or
why; sometimes the new versions just replace what you’d done
before, whether figuratively in your memory or literally on your
hard drive. In this essay, I want to make the case for using ver-
sion control technology to help keep track of what’s changing in
the course of a writing project, so you can then assess how “what
changes” has changed in the course of a writing class.
For instance, in one of the classic studies of writing process, Nancy
Sommers found that beginning student writers tended to make
changes at the level of word, phrase, and sentence, and that most of
the word/phrase changes were substitutions that didn’t change the
overall structure or meaning. Expert writers, on the other hand,
tended to make more changes at larger-than-paragraph levels, like
theme or section, and they did a lot more cutting and reordering.
So it’s an experiment everyone can do: are your changes changing
as you study writing and get more focused practice and feedback?
But it’s not always easy, in the thick of the writing or after push-
ing through the thicket, to remember what turns you took, or
why; sometimes the new versions just replace what you’d done
before, whether figuratively in your memory or literally on your
hard drive. In this essay, I want to make the case for using ver-
sion control technology to help keep track of what’s changing in
the course of a writing project, so you can then assess how “what
changes” has changed in the course of a writing class.
According to our two-part strategy from sentence reordering, after we’ve
tried a new position we should reassess transitions in the new position. For
sentences, “transitions” meant words or phrases (“but,” “because”); scaling
up to paragraphs, transitions could be whole sentences. In fact, check-
ing transitions after the paragraph-level reordering helped me realize the
“but” was no longer working; the sentence-level reordering in Example 2
was itself a smoothing operation after the paragraph switch. This suggests
another strategy: What you learn at one scale, try applying at another. Note
that I don’t mean just small to large; sometimes the learning works in
both directions.
What’s the Diff?339
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Noteworthy Changes Deserve a Worthy Note
Not every diff is so straightforward as the ones shown above: see Example
4, which shows a whole tangle of revisions as I worked through how to talk
about the changes in my draft.
Example 4. A more complicated diff to interpret
(so maybe not one for the history books)
That’s not to say you’ll stop fiddling with sentences and words
as you get more experience. I’ve written plenty over the years,
but Iin those first two paragraphs alone, I countcan see at least
seven edits word-level changes that shifted the emphasis or clar-
ified what I meant,. edits that feel important enough to me as a
writer to name:Some wording changes are powerful. For example
changed pronouns, including myself by changing you to we in
the ; I added new ? The last sentence of paragraph two used to
talk about “how you grow your expertise as a writer,” until I ac-
knowledged that I’m still growing, so I changed the pronouns to
include myself.
I went from planning a list of seven edits to choosing one to focus on; I
tried describing some edits as “important” in a single word, then as a whole
expanded phrase, then cut both. This moment in the revision process was
kind of a mess, really. Why show it to you, then? A few reasons.
First, to make sure I’m not overstating my claim or setting you up for
confusion. The truth is, not every diff is important or a source of great
insight. Sometimes, the best response is to acknowledge that drafting is
messy, and move on. Second, following from that truth, the moments that
do feel like accomplishments are worth marking, so you can find them
again later. (See Figure 1, below, where several revisions are marked with
notes, and the less interesting moments in the history are marked simply
as dates.)
Luckily, many writing tools with version trackers let you add “named
versions” within the file’s history.2 You can use these names to say where
2. In LibreOffice, you can find the option to name a save under File > Versions… > Save
New Version; in Google Docs, timestamps saved automatically under File > Version
History can be renamed (though only 40 per document). One version tracker pop-
ular among programmers and technical writers, called git, tracks only these named
versions, which it calls “commits.” I kind of love the energy of that: it’s like, “Okay, I
know you’ve saved this file, but are you ready to commit to it? Is this an official version
you’d want to look at again later?”
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you are relative to some point in the process, as in “first draft” or “500
words to go”; or, even better, you can use the notes to briefly describe
what’s changing, and why. A note like “first draft” doesn’t tell you, if you
look back at it later, how far you’d gotten by the first draft. By contrast,
a note like “reorder Sommers quote from third page to first” or “finished
section on barracudas” tells you what you’ve actually done. A glance back
through a series of such notes when the essay is complete can help you
call to mind all the highlights of your process and reflect on what you
learned—or what you want to ask for feedback on.

.
Figure 1. One form of annotated revision history (“named versions”), from a
Google Docs version of this chapter. Even the limited space of the annotation
allows various kinds of notes: descriptions of what’s changed (“Finished section
on examples of diffs”), status updates (“Just a little note to self”), plans for future
working sessions (“next: name your own! swap with friends!”), etc. Screenshot
shows a list of five timestamped versions of a document, with labels including text
quoted in the figure caption. An option to show only named versions is unselect-
ed. Screenshot by author.
But even before the essay is complete, these notes can be powerful.
Pausing to describe what you were just working on—even pausing to de-
cide whether to describe what you were working on—opens up a space for
reflection. Version notes invite you to think actively about how you’re writ-
NB: Microsoft Word and Apple Pages allow you to compare versions of documents,
and Word will even autosave versions to compare, but as of this writing neither Word
nor Pages has the built-in capacity to name a save or attach a comment to specif-
ic versions.
What’s the Diff?341
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ing, whether to save a move you just made for future reference or to com-
pare your present writing situation to others you’ve been in before. And
that kind of metacognition, or thinking about your thinking, has been
found to be important in developing expertise (How People Learn 50, 18).
What’s more, if your writing is interrupted (life happens), version notes
can be a place to lay down tracks for yourself to return to. Scrolling through
just the noteworthy moments when you get back, you might well recover
the momentum you had when you left off, allowing you to resume mid-
stream rather than just read the whole draft from the top. Paul Ford, writ-
ing in the New York Times about open source software, had a memorable
take on this kind of process recap. He wrote, “I read the change logs, and
I think: humans can do things.” If you find yourself in the grip of writer’s
block, version notes can offer a reminder: you, a writer, can do things.
Looking Back to Look Forward
I’m taking the phrase “revision strategies” from one of the classic studies of
writing processes, by Nancy Sommers. By comparing early and late drafts
in two groups of writers, she identified four recurring “operations”—addi-
tion, subtraction, substitution, and reordering—taking place at four dif-
ferent “levels” of text: word, phrase, sentence, and “theme (the extended
statement of one idea)” (Sommers 380). Most interestingly for practical
purposes, she found a difference between the two groups based on their
experience level. Beginning student writers tended to make changes on
the scale of words, phrases, and sentences, and most of the word/phrase
changes were substitutions: they didn’t change the overall structure or even
meaning, since a lot of the substituted words were synonyms. Professional
adult writers made small changes, too, but also tended to go beyond—they
made more changes at larger-than-paragraph levels, like theme or section,
and they did a lot more cutting and reordering.
Their revision goals were different, too: the student writers in Som-
mers’s study mostly wanted to “clean up” their early drafts (381), while
the experienced writers talked about taking their drafts apart to find the
heart of the argument (383-4)—in a sense, using revision to “rough up”
the earlier draft and make something better from the pieces. Sommers’s
experiment was a long time ago, but it’s an experiment you can repeat even
more easily now, with your own writing: When you have to revisit a first
draft, do you look for ways to “clean it up”? Or do you ask yourself what
else, what next idea or better explanation, the draft helps you figure out?
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What do you think your revision history would have to say about it? It’s
worth asking, because what we think we’re doing and what the evidence
shows aren’t always the same. In 2018, Heather Lindenman and colleagues
published a study comparing students’ drafts with reflective memos they’d
written about them. They found that many students claimed to have
learned new revision skills in their first-year writing courses, but those re-
vision moves weren’t actually there when the researchers looked at the diffs.
As the authors put it, “students articulated improved writing knowledge in
their memos—they talked the talk—but they did not enact it in their revi-
sions—they did not walk the walk” (589). So if you feel like you’ve realized
something new this semester about how to improve your writing, it’s worth
checking to see if it’s actually showing up in your latest drafts. What you
expect is changing in your writing, or what you hope is changing, may or
may not be visible there.
It’s not always easy, in the thick of the writing, to remember what turns
you took, or why; sometimes the new versions just replace what you’d done
before, whether figuratively in your memory or literally on your hard drive.
Using version history can help you keep track of what you’ve done through-
out the course of a writing project, so you can then assess how your strat-
egies have changed—and where they might be useful again in the future.
So before you write a final reflection, on either that piece of writing or
a whole course, you’d do well to grab some evidence from your revision
history. Or, if you find it’s not there yet, you can start making some new
history now.
The More Strategies, the Merrier
To find more revision strategies, you may only have to start looking at
drafts where something really clicked—where you know your revisions
really improved the final product. But to get the most out of it, work with a
group. If you share what you find among peers, classmates, or other writing
partners, the chances increase that everyone will pick up something new.
In the interest of such sharing, here are a few moves I’ve noticed recur-
ring in my diffs:
• Thickening. Add a new sentence between two existing ones, e.g.
to add more detail to an otherwise general statement. Especially
useful around quotations that need more context.
• Prying open. The scaled-up, paragraph-level version of thickening:
add a whole new paragraph between existing paragraphs, e.g. to in-
What’s the Diff?343
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sert a more concrete example of an abstract idea, or to acknowledge
and respond to some possible misreading. Also works with sections
(see Example 6).
• Regrouping. Sometimes, instead of new material, all you need is
a change in punctuation. Adding a period (or a paragraph break)
can sometimes let your readers catch their breath and fully under-
stand one thought before you ask them to move on (see Example
5). Section headings can do the same at a larger scale (see Example
6). Conversely, substituting a semicolon for a period can emphasize
how closely two ideas are related.
• Reframing. Add new material at the beginning of the draft (or para-
graph, or section) with the goal of helping readers see how the ex-
isting material fits into a larger conversation; see Example 7, below.
Note that this could also be considered a scaled-up version of a
traditional sentence-level strategy like adding transitions.
• Removing the scaffolding. Kind of the opposite of reframing: delete
preparatory passages that aren’t part of the actual building / idea,
even though you couldn’t have built it without them.
• Making it explicit. Add new material at the end of a sentence, para-
graph, or section to explain the significance or consequence of
what you just said. Say outright what you thought was implied the
first time.
• Fine-tuning. Substitute individual words to adjust their overtones,
so they better match your intended root meaning. (For example,
I wanted “overtones” in that sentence rather than “associations,”
because “overtones” is associated with music and reinforces the
musical aspect of “tuning.”)
To find these, as I said, I went through my version history and tried to
(a) describe the changes I saw, and (b) explain what I hoped each change
would accomplish. You can do the same, especially if you already took
notes as you went along to mark the revisions of which you’re the most
proud.
Example 5. Regrouping at the sentence
level (replacing colon with period)
In this essay, I want to help you see revision better:. I want to help
you think through what you do with sentences, because what we
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do with sentences we can also do with paragraphs, pages, and even
larger chunks of writing.
Example 6. Regrouping to carve out an
extra section within an existing one
The more strategies, the merrierWhere I’m coming from, and where
you’re going
I’m taking the phrase “revision strategies” from one of the classic studies
of writing process, by Nancy Sommers. By comparing early and late
drafts in two groups of writers, she found that beginning student writers
tended to make changes at the level of word, phrase, and sentence, and
that most of the word/phrase changes were substitutions: they didn’t
change the overall structure or meaning. Experienced adult writers made
those changes, too, but also tended to go beyond—they made more
changes at larger-than-paragraph levels, like theme or section, and they
did a lot more cutting and reordering.
The more strategies, the merrier
Sommers’ original article makes from some great reading, despite its
kind of boring title […]
From Discovery to Planning
So far, my advice has mostly been retrospective: I’m asking you to look
back at the revisions you’ve already made, and glean strategies from them.
That’s not a bad place to start, but the bigger goal is to improve your writ-
ing by expanding the ways you know how to improve your writing. This
raises an important question: How will you know when to apply one kind
of strategy over another—when to add more in the middle or the begin-
ning, when to reorder or regroup?
Example 7. Reframing by adding
at the start of a section
Strategy Search Suggestions
So far, my advice has been mostly retrospective: I’m asking you to
look back at the revision you’ve already made, and glean strategies
from them. That’s not a bad place to start, but the bigger goal isn’t
simply to label and catalog all these moves, but rather to use them
What’s the Diff?345
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moving forward, to improve your writing by expanding the ways
you know how to improve writing. This raises an important ques-
tion: How will you know when to apply one kind of strategy over
another—when to add more in the middle, when to reorder or
regroup? Unfortunately, there’s no hard and fast rule: it’ll usually
depend on the particulars of your argument […]
Unfortunately, there’s no hard and fast set of rules: it’ll ultimately depend
on the particulars of your argument or narrative when you might want to
restructure, or thicken, or reframe. Sometimes the best approach is to ask
friendly readers where they had questions or had to reread more than once
to understand. But since reordering is often both my most challenging and
most rewarding revision move, here’s what has helped me realize it might
be time to try it:
• Distant callbacks. If you find yourself saying things like “As I said
earlier,” it’s worth checking how much earlier it was. If readers will
have to remember your point from before a whole intervening sec-
tion, maybe it would make more sense to reposition the new part
closer to the first part. On the other hand, maybe all you need is a
regrouping: could you add new section titles to help readers antic-
ipate the jump away from the first idea and back to it later? That
might make it easier to follow your line of thought.
• Bringing it down to size, for example, with a “reverse sentence out-
line.” A reverse outline is one you write after a draft exists, allow-
ing you—like Sommers’ experienced adult writers—to search that
draft for the shape of an emerging argument, rather than assume
the argument is already clear. By outlining in sentences, you essen-
tially scale down the big picture into a paragraph or two: for many
writers, a more familiar and manageable space in which to regroup,
reorder, and recognize gaps to fill in (or extraneous chunks to cut).
Once you’ve done it with the outline, the corresponding changes
you can make in the piece as a whole should be easier to identify.
For regrouping, I think about needing a break. Beginnings and endings
are positions of power; anything next to a pause gets extra emphasis. Con-
versely, long stretches without a beginning or ending—whether it’s a four-
line sentence or a full-page paragraph—seem to suggest there’s nothing
worth emphasizing. But that’s usually not the case! So when I see a long
paragraph or sentence, I look more closely for the highlights, and I try to
place a period or paragraph break alongside them.
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There are troves of authors with additional advice and suggested moves
to look into; I’ve found Wendy Bishop’s “Revising Out and Revising In”
and E. Shelley Reid’s Solving Writing Problems to be particularly helpful.
Whatever move you choose, if you take a note as you’re trying it, you’ll be
able to come back later and assess how successful it was for your draft. And
seeing it in the context of your other named versions will help you consider
whether it might work as well, or better, at another point in your process
or on another level of scale.
A Parade of Small Rewards
Looking back and looking forward are all well and good, but above all it’s
the mid-process reflection that keeps me coming back to diffs. Recording
what’s changing helps us realize that there is actual progress happening,
even when it might not look like it. As someone who has struggled with
writer’s block and anxiety for as long as I can remember, many of my first
drafts don’t look like much of anything, often for a long time. But a look
through my diffs shows the progress that word counts alone would leave
invisible: the hundreds of words written, then erased; the paragraphs of
ideas in a particular order that turned out to be incompatible with another
structure, and so had to be cut. In naming each revision, even when the
revision move is subtraction, we get to pause and celebrate the writing that
was there.
When do you usually celebrate your writing? When the essay is com-
plete? When a grade comes back (depending on the grade)? When you
don’t have to think about it any more? By acknowledging the hard work
and successes of mid-draft changes, version history reminds us that the
journey itself is studded with small victories.
Works Cited
Bishop, Wendy. “Revising Out and Revising In.” Acts of Revision: A Guide for Writ-
ers, edited by Wendy Bishop, Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 2004, pp. 13-27.
Ford, Paul. “Letter of Recommendation: Bug Fixes.” The New York Times, 11
June 2019. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/
letter-of-recommendation-bug-fixes-git.html.
How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition. 2nd
ed., National Academy Press, 2000. https://www.nap.edu/catalog/9853/
how-people-learn-brain-mind-experience-and-school-expanded-edition.
What’s the Diff?347
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Lindenman, Heather, Martin Camper, Lindsay Dunne Jacoby, and Jessica Enoch.
“Revision and Reflection: A Study of (Dis)Connections between Writing
Knowledge and Writing Practice.” College Composition and Communication,
vol. 69, no. 4, June 2018, pp. 581-611.
Sommers, Nancy. “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult
Writers.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 31, no. 4, Dec. 1980,
pp. 378-88.
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Teacher Resources for “What’s the Diff?
Version History and Revision Reflections”
Overview and Teaching Strategies
This essay is intended to support students in making conscious interven-
tions in existing drafts, starting by exposing the specific textual changes
from one draft to another: their “diffs.” For purposes of reflecting on past
and current practices, the chapter may work best if read after students
have already begun revising their compositions, as not everyone will have
saved work from previous courses. On the other hand, it also encourag-
es students to develop a writerly practice of recording revision intentions
alongside each diff they recognize as significant enough to put a label on.
Doing so effectively takes, well, practice, and so I would recommend start-
ing relatively early.
I have found that some feedback on version notes—see Supporting Ex-
ercise 2, below—can help students learn to write them in a way that still
makes sense when read weeks later. Even stating that future-self as an au-
dience, and reminding students of the goal of writing for that audience,
seems to help over time. Early on, it can be helpful to model the process in
real time (e.g. while revising something together in class), or in a screencast.
Several pieces of comp/rhet scholarship inspired the ideas in this essay
and could be similarly inspiring for students to read (or read excerpts from)
alongside it. Nancy Sommers’ “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and
Experienced Adult Writers” would be a natural companion, as I lean on
Sommers’ analysis, but present only one finding from her complex article.
Lindenman et al’s “Revision and Reflection: A Study of (Dis)Connections
between Writing Knowledge and Writing Practice,” which in some ways
prompted this piece’s deep dive into diffs for a student audience, could also
work well for a Writing About Writing course. Finally, the Wendy Bishop
chapter I mention, “Revising Out and Revising In,” from her collection
Acts of Revision, is written with an undergraduate audience in mind and
offers over 70 suggestions for revision moves, many with fun names. I have
often asked my students to pick three of Bishop’s exercises, try them in
their current drafts, and then discuss in the next class or their final reflec-
tions what happened: Would they try it again? At the same or a different
point in the process? Why?