Look at your downdraft through the following lenses. The deliverable for each lens is italicized.
Lens One: Coding for Exposition
Remember that this multigenre research essay is a cultural history of your practice or artifact. As such, it should contain a lot of Real Information. It shouldn’t, however, be a clip-and-paste collage of stuff you’ve found in your research. Think about how you’re incorporating facts into the story of your thinking about your subject. Think about how you’re making exposition your own. Then get out two different colored highlighters and color code your essay.
Color 1. Highlight information that illuminates the history of your subject.
Color 2. Highlight other Real Information about your subject.
Lens Two: Felt Sense
“(The term) calls forth images, words, ideas, and vague fuzzy feelings that are anchored in the writer’s body. What is elicited, then, is not solely a product of mind, but of a mind alive in a living, sensing body.”—Sondra Perl
Felt sense is about what you feel when you pay close attention to the words you’ve put on the page; felt sense links the body to the mind. If your writing is on the right track, it will feel right and satisfying. But if the words or the structure or your argument feels wrong when you re-read your essay, you’ll need to make changes to fit your emerging sense of what will work.
Read your draft slowly and carefully, paying attention to what you’re feeling:
-Where you get bored or start to drift.
-Where you get tangled up in a sentence, or have to slow down or re-read for clarity
-Where things seem a little obvious, or outlandish, or otherwise off.
Make notes in the margins about what you’re feeling.
A final note: Revising means re-seeing
Remember that moving from downdraft to updraft isn’t just a matter of proofreading or “fixing” things. Look to take another major leap on EVERY level of the essay—from ideas to narrative design to polished prose. Toward this end, remember to re-write your essay instead of attempting to edit it on the computer screen, which leads to small, safe changes.