10 Chapter Ten: You, Thinking Again

Wow—you’ve gone through the whole writing process, thinking about audience and purpose, exploring, creating a thesis, planning, drafting, maybe even researching. Now, you have a complete piece of writing: an essay, email, proposal, research paper, or other form of writing. You’re done, right?

Wait just a minute. Actually, in many ways, you are just beginning. Now, you need to rethink everything. This process is often called revising or revision, but it’s really about rethinking the choices you’ve made so far and trying out some new options.

Rethinking, for most writers, is the most crucial part of the writing process. You may think that a completed first draft means little improvement is needed; you just need to fix errors. Even experienced writers, however, need to improve their drafts, and they rely on peers during rethinking and editing processes.

You may know that athletes miss catches, fumble balls, or overshoot goals. Dancers forget steps, turn too slowly, or miss beats. For both athletes and dancers, the more they practice, the stronger their performance will become. Designers of artificial intelligence are constantly learning and improving, trying to make Generative AI more accurate and useful. Writers have the same capacity to profit from improvement and rethinking.

Rethinking is the act of starting the writing process over again. When you have a completed draft, you need to go back and check that the draft works. Take a second look at your ideas. You might add, cut, move, or change information to make your ideas clearer, more accurate, more interesting, or more convincing.

This might sound like a lot, but this process can be abbreviated for certain parts of the writing depending on what you might be more skilled at in your writing. For example, if you plan well at the start, you might not need to spend that much time rethinking your organization. Understanding what needs more or less attention takes some practice, and with that practice, this rethinking can be faster.

The Writing Process and Rethinking

Take a look at the writing process again—in the rethinking stage:

Going back through the writing process to ask questions (as in the above chart) is the first step in rethinking. Look at your own work with a critical eye.

Rethinking audience and purpose

Now that you have a completed (but not completed) piece of writing, whether an email, a research paper, a cover letter, or a report on airplane engine types, you need to make sure you still have a clear audience and purpose connection. You maybe have started a narrative essay, for example, thinking your audience was your composition class and your purpose was to entertain. As you write your paper, though, you might see that you are angling your ideas more toward high school students who are considering attending a community college and your purpose is more persuasive or informative. That’s great—it’s a much more specific audience and purpose. Now you just need to make sure the rest of the paper matches the new audience and purpose.

Rethinking thesis statement and focus

Many writer teachers call a thesis statement a “working thesis” because the first attempt is rarely the final version. As a writer, you start out with an idea, but as you work through the writing process, often your main ideas and focus change (often in much more interesting ways). The trick is to make sure to rethink your thesis and make sure it still fits the rest of the paper.

Here’s an example. You may start out with the working thesis, “The first week of college is crazy: you have to find all your classes, deal with a million different types of professors, and meet new people.” This is a classic five paragraph essay structure. It also fits that idea we talked about in the audience and purpose rethinking, more entertaining and focused on college students. As you wrote the essay, though, you realize that you started thinking more about tips for incoming high school students who are about to start their first semester. You then need to revise the thesis, maybe several times (after you have re-thought the organization and content).

In the end, you might end up with something like “Students who are starting the first semester of college need to be prepared for lots of new challenges: professor expectations, balancing a heavy schedule, getting involved in campus activities, and (most importantly) building a community of support.”

Rethinking organization: re-planning

One of the hardest parts of rethinking a piece of writing is being willing to reorganize. You may have started with a clear plan—three main ideas with examples that tie back to
a thesis, but as you draft the paper and start really fleshing out your ideas, your writing can shift. Think about the example above about the thesis. It started with three main ideas but then shifted to focus in audience and purpose and also changed main ideas, not only in number but in content. This might mean you need to re-plan or even re-outline.

You might use Generative AI to help rethink organization

Copilot prompt: “Here is an outline of an essay for college composition. Suggest a different organization: Introduction: Talk about my first day at my university and how confused and overwhelmed I was.”

Rethinking Drafting: Content and writing moves

Once you have rethought the organization, then you can redraft. This could involve following a new outline or plan, making sure the content connects to the new thesis statement, and creating content that works with a new audience and purpose.

As you redraft, you might think up new examples, add research or data, try new writing moves like persuasion or compare and contract. You might also cut paragraphs and add new ones, rewrite introductions and conclusions and more.

Redrafting might also mean continually rethinking your plan and organization then drafting again. You might end up with four or five drafts before you feel confident with the piece of writing.

Rethinking style and word choices

These concepts are covered in Chapter Twelve. After your draft feels really good, then you can start rethinking the words and sentences and flow of the paper.

Rethinking grammar and mechanics choices

Once you feel the flow of the paper is good, then look at the rules: grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and more. Take a look at Chapter Thirteen for more information.

Other Strategies for Rethinking

How do you get the best out of your rethinking process? Here are some strategies that writers have developed to look at their first drafts from a fresh perspective:

Sometimes editing and rethinking are the same thing–and they can be the same thing. However, rethinking can sometimes mean completely rewriting your paper, and that is bigger than just editing. Rethinking can also be called global content editing.

Chart: Levels of Rethinking

Chart: This chart lays out the levels of rethinking from broad to narrow.

Parts of this chapter were adapted from from: From Business English For Success.

Resources

“Revising Drafts” The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2025, https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/revising-drafts.

“Reverse Outlines: A Writer’s Technique for Examining Organization.” The Writing Center, University of Wisconsin Madison, n.d., https://writing.wisc.edu/handbook/reverseoutlines/ Accessed 22 Apr. 2025.

“Steps for Revising Your Paper.” Purdue University OWL, 2024, https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/the_writing_process/proofreading/steps_for_revising.html.