Revision follows a slow and objective reexamination of that first draft.
It allows us to react to our first thoughts and to refine and expand them. Critical Distance Hopefully during the time between turning in your rough draft and when you sit down to revise, you can develop some objectivity about your writing. Very often, once you have something down on paper, you see only brilliance in your arguments and phrases. I often read what I meant to write, not what I actually wrote. After a few days, though, it becomes easier to approach the paper as if it were written by someone else.