Pasadena City College

Writing Center
English 901

REVISION LESSON ONE

4.1 Revising for Focus, Organization, Development, and
Sentence Clarity
Purpose
This lesson helps determine whether an essay is focused and organized, whether
its ideas are developed adequately, and whether its ideas and supporting detail
are expressed clearly on the word and sentence level.
Focus means that the essays ideas and supporting details/ evidence work
together to convey a thesis.the essays overall argument. One quick way to
check for focus is to read over the essay title, thesis statement, and topic
sentences. This quick read should indicate whether major ideas developed in the
essay connect to the overall argument suggested by the thesis statement and
essay title, indicate whether major ideas are logically organized in support of the
thesis statement, and whether major ideas are unnecessarily repeated.
One quick way to determine whether major ideas are adequately developed is
paragraph length. If body paragraphs are typically short, more details/evidence
to develop the ideas introduced in the topic sentences should be considered.
Combining some of the shorter paragraphs into one longer paragraph, introduced
with an appropriate topic sentence, may also be necessary. See Writers
Reference, C-4e, for more information about paragraph length.
One last tip: Always revise for focus, thesis, organization, and development first.
Once these global revisions are made, then revise for word choice and sentence
clarity. Reading each word aloud will often alert you to the omission of necessary
words, use of the wrong word, and general sentence confusion. Also reading the
sentences aloud in reverse order forces you to concentrate on what your
sentences actually say rather than on what you think they say.
Directions
FIRST, print out a hard copy of the student essay, Got Internet? AND the
Revision and Edit Guide. For this essay assignment, the student was

Pasadena City College

Writing Center
English 901

instructed to use her own experience and observation as primary support

for her thesis on internet use and to select information from articles she
had read to support her thesis. She was also required to use MLA format
to document this borrowed information.
SECOND, read over Got Internet? and number the paragraphs for easy
referencing on the Revision and Edit Guide.
THIRD, after reading the essay and numbering the paragraphs, answer
the questions on the Revision and Edit Guide and mark the essay as
directed. Your answers and suggested revisions will frame the discussion
for the peer editing workshops in Lesson Two.