Identifiable skills, practical techniques, working notes, instinct, gut feeling, hunches. Though they may sound like an unlikely troupe of players, when you write and revise you call on all of them. But no tool for working your way into a draft is more important than just reading it as carefully as your ears will let you and staying focused on what you intended to say. Say, not just describe or explain, even if your project requires that some things are described and some other things are explained. Revision is less a matter of fixing errors than of saying more clearly, thinking your writing through from the ground up so that you know why you’re doing something, why you’re going somewhere, why you’re taking the reader somewhere with you.
Germano, William. On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts. University of Chicago Press, 2021. p. 7 (italics in original)
