technique - 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 proper order and using topic sentences and transitions so that the reader can easily follow my train of thought.

The most effective methods that I have found for revising are to either rewrite from a paper draft or to reverse engineer an outline and then re-organize and re-write. This feels like it is overkill, but sometimes it is the only way that I can get my head around what has become a sea of words.

I am not sure if the answers will be specific to a particular type of writing, but I am a scientist writing journal articles and proposals.

Question

I would appreciate advice on effective methods that can be used for revising, perhaps an algorithm. Is there a set of steps that I can follow each time I need to revise?

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notes:

I don't consider this a duplicate of a previous question about editing, because that question and its answers focus on grammar and copy-editing, which is not my concern here.

An answer to another question provides good advice on shortening a text, so I have excluded this aspect from my question.

Answer

Without going back to an outline, you could do the following:

• Print your draft on paper.


• Take some fluoresecent colored pens and mark all the words that are specific to your paper. Not words like "the" and "research", but words like "unification algorithm" or "eukaryotic cell". Use different colors for different topics in your paper.


• If you see the same words/colors in many remote places, move those sentences closer together (you're obviously back behind your computer now ;-). Ideally, each section talks about a single topic, so it should have more or less only 1 color. Since your paper was a "sea of words" to begin with, you lose nothing by moving things around. Never mind the "flow" for now: just the topics.


• Now that the topics are "sealed" into sections, remove all duplicate sentences. Keep only the ones that give new information.


• Order the sentences so that new terminology/ideas are introduced in a logical order, i.e. new words/concepts are defined before they're used.


• From each group of sentences, make a temporary title and put it in front of the group. It may not make it as a title into the final paper, but it brings an outline back into the paper for yourself.


• Now, and only now, start looking at the grammar and the flow. Turn each group of sentences into a few paragraphs right there underneath their temporary title. Make sure that each group expresses exactly the idea in their temporary title.


• For better "flow", start larger sections with a summary of what you explained in the previous section, and then show the connection to the new section. You can quickly see what you explained in the previous section by going over their temporary titles.


• At the end, take all your temporary titles and turn them into a summary. You can use this as the introduction, the conclusion of the paper, or even both if you rewrite it slightly.



• Then remove most of the temporary titles, keeping only the "big" ones to structure the paper for your readers.

Regardless of which technique(s) you use from the many excellent answers, let us all know how it worked out for you! Good luck.