INTERVIEWER: How much rewriting do you do?
HEMINGWAY: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
INTERVIEWER: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?
HEMINGWAY: Getting the words right.
(Ernest Hemingway, "The Art of Fiction," The Paris Review Interview, 1956)
I'm a firm believer that revision makes the writer. So as a writing teacher, I always require substantial revision (you can read here about how it manifests in my grading policy). But of course, reading several successive drafts of the same student essays can be downright impractical.
Enter the "Compare Documents" feature in Microsoft Word. Stop trying to discern differences between drafts by holding them side-by-side. Let Word do it for you!
Using this feature allows me immediately to see what has changed from one draft to the next, and to flip between the two versions. I can even see the digital comments I left on the original draft, and quickly assess whether revisions have addressed them. (Gone are the days of rereading an entire ten-page essay to determine the student only changed one sentence on page three...)
Check out the tutorial:
Using this feature allows me immediately to see what has changed from one draft to the next, and to flip between the two versions. I can even see the digital comments I left on the original draft, and quickly assess whether revisions have addressed them. (Gone are the days of rereading an entire ten-page essay to determine the student only changed one sentence on page three...)
Check out the tutorial:
