If the hardest thing about writing is starting, then editing is probably a close second. YOU wrote the thing — if you could have written it differently, you would have, right? Editing is especially challenging if you approach it in the same way that you approach writing a first draft. The way that a good editor looks at a draft is different than the way that a strong writer looks at a blank page. So, maybe the secret to editing your own work is figuring out how to trick your eyes.
Whenever you edit your own work, you should give yourself something to look for, something more concrete than “more or less the same but better.” It can also help to give yourself a different way to look at your work — a way that makes you consider your choices as an author as choices and lets you view your words through a different lens than you would as the person who wrote them. Let’s overextend this metaphor. Here is a visual editing techniques that can help you evaluate the effectiveness of your argumentation:
AXES Highlighting
If you are trying to support a clear argument throughout your work, it is important to remember all of the different steps that you have to take to make that argument. There are a lot of different heuristics for outlining an argument, but for a quick and dirty editing exercise, consider the AXES model. AXES stands for Assertion, eXample, Explanation, and Significance. To make an argument in your paper, you need to:
A: Identify the ASSERTION that you will be making for your audience
X: Support that assertion with an EXAMPLE (some kind of evidence)
E: EXPLAIN how that example supports the assertion, or ELABORATE on the example so that your audience can follow your reasoning
S: Detail the SIGNIFICANCE of your this argument and connect it to the larger thread of your paper
So, one way to evaluate the way that you support your arguments throughout the paper is to pretend/assume that every sentence in your paper is doing one of these four things. It is either making an ASSERTION, supporting that assertion with an EXAMPLE, offering an EXPLANATION of how that example supports the assertion (or ELABORATING on the example), or identifying the SIGNIFICANCE of the thing you are trying to convey. Of course, this isn’t entirely true–or, rather, it’s maybe true but not the most precise way to account for what you do in a paper. That’s fine–we’re not looking for precise; we’re looking for useful.
To do this, first assign each of those rhetorical moves (A, X, E, and S) a color.
Assertion (red), eXample (blue), Explanation (green), Significance (magenta)
Then, read through your paper and highlight every sentence you have written with the color that corresponds to what that sentence is doing, using the AXES model. So (using the colors, above) if you are stating a claim in a sentence, that sentence turns red. If you are providing evidence to support a claim, that sentence is blue. And so on.
Here is an example of a highlighted AXES paragraph:
Rather than being driven by political power and ideological aims, economic logics—with their own ideological concerns—better explain decades of U.S. dominance in audiovisual production and trade. As Hoskins and Mirus (1988) explain, the scale and wealth of the U.S. market created incredible advantages in exporting movies and series. They argue U.S. titles derived less of a “cultural discount” because so many markets had been “acclimatized to Hollywood product,” despite a preference for what Straubhaar (1991) terms “proximate” content. In practice, the need to create titles for an expansive and heterogeneous American mass market led to productions that planed off a lot of cultural specificity, and many of the most popular titles emphasized universal themes such as family dynamics or narrative pleasures such as mystery resolution. Indeed, the “style, values, beliefs, institutions, and behavioral patterns” (Hoskins & Mirus, 1988, p. 500) found in U.S. titles were often as foreign to many Americans as to those who viewed them from around the globe. This is not to say that such titles are not imbued with belief structures pervasive in American culture—for example surrounding individualism—but to note we lack detailed scholarship grounded in textual analysis of what characteristics make titles specifically and exclusively “American.” Instead, country of production has been assumed indicative of cultural features.
Lotz, A. D., Eklund, O., & Soroka, S. (2022). Netflix, library analysis, and globalization: rethinking mass media flows. Journal of Communication. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqac020
Once you do this for your whole paper, you have a new way of editing. Without considering the details of what you have written, you can see if you transition evenly between each of those four moves. Or, you might find:
Assertion Dominant
If you find that your paper is dominated by whatever color you’ve assigned to ASSERTIONS, then that means you might be lacking evidence for those claims. Or, perhaps, the evidence that you do offer is underdeveloped. Another possibility is that, instead of supporting your claims with evidence, you merely re-state your claims in a different way (i.e. you add emphasis, not examples). For some kinds of writing, this isn’t so bad. Nobody expects a lot of evidence in a wedding sermon. But, in terms of academic writing, papers that don’t support their main claims can come off as polemical–opinionated, but not particularly justified. A lot of hat, no cattle.
eXamples Dominant
Maybe your paper isn’t claim-heavy, though. Maybe you’ve found that you offer lots and lots of EXAMPLES, but rarely tie them to assertions or elaborate on their importance for your audience. If you’ve ever had a professor comment “too descriptive” on your paper, this is what’s happening. Remember that the point of evidence/examples in your writing should be to support the claims you are making–not the other way around. Certainly, there are times when you need a glut of examples (beginning your paper with an interesting narrative or anecdote is a good use of descriptive writing), but for the most part, the evidence you introduce should serve a purpose: they have to support the claims you are making.
Explanation Dominant
To be honest, this one is a little rare. However, if you’re finding your paper exceptionally green, it could mean that you are EXPLAINING things that don’t need your explanation. Whereas a paper that is example dominant might be too descriptive, a paper that is explanation dominant might be somewhat convoluted: you’re explaining things but it isn’t clear how those things tie into your main argument or why such an elaborate explanation is necessary. Make sure that you don’t get too in the weeds when elaborating on your evidence. If you find yourself trailing off, try to re-establish the argument you are trying to make.
Significance Dominant
When you aren’t particularly solid on the argument you want to make, you may tend to overemphasize the SIGNIFICANCE of an argument like it. Lots of sizzle, no steak; sound and fury signifying nothing. If you find that your paper is significance heavy, try to clarify the argument that you are making and the context in which you are making it. In other words, who are you speaking to and what are you trying to say? You already have the “why” part down.