Revising the First Draft
The previous tip provided you with several steps to writing the first draft of your paper. The next steps include revising or rewriting your draft until it is polished and improved.

1. Follow the steps below to help revise your first draft.
2. After someone has reviewed and commented on your draft, put it away for 24 hours without looking or worrying about it. 
3. The next day, read only the reviewers comments and re-read all of your pre-writes (brain dump). 
4. Read your draft once without making any notations. 
5. Re-read your draft again carefully. Now is the time to make notations for changes. Review and comment on your draft as if it belonged to someone else. You are to use only three to four of the following comments: 

Add an example.  Good example. This is why it is a good example:  Add details here.  Good details. This is why these details are good:  Write more about this.  This sounds honest.  This part might be left out.  You’ve lost me.

When you have finished the review, put away all of your pre-writes, first draft, reviews, and comments for 24 hours. 

1. The next day, prepare to revise your draft. Look at all of the suggestions you and your reviewer(s) made about your draft. Start filling in details and examples, removing parts that don’t seem to fit or moving them to a part of the draft where they do seem to work to meet the competition guidelines. 
2. Type a new draft. 
3. Ask someone look over your second draft for content, exactly like the steps for the first draft. 
4. Once this is done, repeat steps 1-8 about one to two more times. 
5. At this point, start proofreading your draft and begin editing and working on the mechanics of your paper (grammar, punctuation, spelling, noun-verb agreement, etc.). 
6. Ask someone to edit your paper. 
7. Make editing changes and print out the final copy.