: Re: What methods can I use to revise my writing? Background I am finding it challenging to transform an early draft into a finished product. My biggest challenges are putting the prose in the

@Frith254

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Caveat: I assume you have a backup of your work (using a version control software would be also beneficial here).

Go through every section/sentence. When you find stuff that could belong to a different chapter, name or number it and put this name into a reference list for this different chapter. E.g. the chapter is about cars from Porsche, then name the references POR01, POR02. The names must be easily retrievable with the find operation of your editor.

When you got through the whole text, start moving the sections where they belong to. Pick one at a time from your reference list, use Find and keep moving (and probably rewriting).

If you are in doubt what to do with a sentence, paragraph or section, then delete it. If you find out the next day, that you really need it, retrieve it from your backup or write it anew. But don‘t let it remain in a hideous spot in your text. Get rid of the crap.

These lists are like mini-outlines for each chapter or idea you have. This is not resorting your train of thought(s) yet. Only taking one thought at a time and look what belongs to it.

For putting together the train of thought correctly (and the overall outline), you should keep in mind, that you want to convince the reader. (I use convincing in a very broad sense here. If you write a manual for a video recorder, you try to convince the reader to use the recorder correctly.)

To convince him, the reader needs to know all necessary preliminaries before you can make your point. So what has the reader to learn upfront? Put it in the beginning of your text. What is the point you really want to make? Place it at the end.

Now the real challenge begins. How do you get from start to end? This is what Lauren's answer is about. At this point you should be able to follow that advice.

If you have problems, how to bridge the gap from one paragraph to the following, I suggest, that you post the problematic paragraphs (two or three of them) in a second question. With a concrete example the community can help you much better there. And you get ideas how to solve the other paragraphs. If you stuck again, post them.

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