Once you’ve finished the first draft of your research paper, you move on to one of the most important steps in the research process: revision and editing! This step focuses on finessing your paper so that you can (a) make it more accessible to the reader, (b) sharpen and clarify the focus and the argument, and (c) improve upon your ideas.

Stage 1 - Revision

Revision involves going through your first draft to note areas where you can improve upon your content, flow, and focus in your paper. Revision is not just about fixing your writing errors - that’s editing (and we’ll get to that further on). Revising your paper means going through the 3 R’s:

• Reorganizing the contents of your paper so that they flow more logically.
• Refining your main thesis, arguments, and supporting evidence.
• Removing details that are unnecessary, or not adding any value to your paper.

As you start your revision process, try to go through your paper from different perspectives in order to check for how well you have presented your research. Think of your audience - will they be able to grasp exactly what you want to convey through your paper?

A great place to start your revision process is by asking yourself, “*What’s my best ___ and my weakest ___?”.* You can fill in the blanks with sentence, paragraph, data, example, source, etc. and then work on improving your weaker areas!

There are many ways to go about the revision process, and we’ve listed some helpful tips and questions to get you started:

1. Have someone else read over your paper. Better yet, have them read it aloud back to you - does it sound right?
2. If your paper were a presentation that you had to give to a group of people, would they be able to understand everything you’re saying? Would there be something missing in your presentations?
3. Who is the intended audience for your paper? Do they have all the information they need to understand your work? Is there any information that is irrelevant to them?
4. Create a fresh outline of your paper and compare it to your first draft. Have you covered everything you wanted to? Go back to the basics.

Know that you do not need to include every single detail related to your topic. Only retain what is directly relevant to your study and adds value to your paper. ****A useful question to ask is “If I remove this piece of information, will my argument/question/resource/data still make sense?”.