Revise it
Paste a draft and take it through four stations, from rethinking the whole piece down to how its sentences sound. You do the revising. The bench keeps your place.
Process: Directed draftingFirst draft
The sample is a short student-style essay Claude wrote for trying the bench.
Station 1 · global
Reverse outline
- Number your paragraphs.
- Beside each one, write one sentence: what it says, and what it does (gives evidence, tells a story, turns the argument).
- Read the outline alone, without the essay. Where’s a repeat, a gap, a paragraph in the wrong place?
- Fix one of them in the draft.
Done early? Write the whole essay’s point in one sentence. Does every paragraph serve it?
Station 2 · global
Cut and move
- Find your strongest paragraph, the center of gravity. Try starting the essay there.
- Move one more paragraph to where it works better.
- Cut the paragraph you’d miss least. Paste it in a “cuts” file; nothing’s lost.
- Reread the new order. Keep it or put it back: either way, you know more about your draft.
Done early? Write a new last sentence that does more than repeat the first.
Station 3 · in between
Say more
- Find your thinnest paragraph: a claim with nothing under it.
- Ask it what a reader would: Like what? How do you know? Why does it matter?
- Answer in the draft with an example, a detail, a source, or a moment.
- Do it again for one more paragraph.
Done early? Trade with a neighbor. Each of you marks one spot that needs “say more.”
Station 4 · local
Read it aloud
- Read your draft out loud, under your breath or to a partner.
- Mark every place you stumble, run out of breath, or get bored.
- Fix those sentences: split them, combine them, cut words, choose a sharper one.
- Last, the proofreading pass: spelling and commas.
Done early? Read only your first and last paragraphs aloud. Do they sound like the same writer?
The end · first draft to last
What changed
- Each sheet sets your first draft, running across, against your draft after a station, running down.
- A stroke along the diagonal is writing you kept where it was. A stroke off the diagonal is a paragraph you moved.
- A stroke straight down is writing you added. A dashed stroke straight across is writing you took out.
- Click a sheet to see it alone. “Straight on” lays all four on one page.
- The grid under it counts every change: what you did, and how much writing it touched.
Where the grid comes from. Nancy Sommers counted revisions this way in 1980: four operations at four levels. Her student writers mostly changed words. Her experienced writers changed the whole piece.