Etymologically, revision is a fancy Latin term for reseeing — or reviewing — a written work. But in writing the form it takes is special. Beyond the common view that revision fixes only bad grammatical and mechanical errors, revision more commonly views grammar, rhetoric, and logic again to enable good reading. Simply, revision is a writer's way of achieving readability, signaling one's concern to keep a reader's needs in mind. Of course, that isn't easy since at their desks all authors doze. Inattention, prejudice, negligence, and the old sleep of reason sometimes take writers into dream worlds where readers drift far from consciousness. Such authors commune with their own thoughts, but they don't communicate.

        My job is to represent those readers. In a way it is a professional editor's job. But for a teacher it is twice complicated by student numbers — always too many — and also by student inexperience. Unlike professional authors, you write neither for love nor money — unless grades be counted — nor for intrinsic motives. College assignments aim at the learning process, not published products. So the artificiality of motive and aim, combined with your inexperience, work often to give you a double dose of reader unconsciousness. Sleeping sickness I call it.

        Of course, I get it too. I stay up writing comments meant to suggest how you can remember readers. Naturally, they are nothing more than the idea you have of your real or implied readers in the act of reading your writing. But frequently you have only the absence of an idea, or more likely an unconscious one, one needing acknowledgment or (occasionally) abandonment. But again, you may have an over-conscious idea, one producing silence or garrulity as a result. Either way, my task is to give you an "idea" of at least one reader's reading, helping you resee by revising your essays. Good reading is my aim.

        Generally it is a product of two influences: my suggestions and your second thoughts. Keep both in mind in revising your essays.