• If your thesis and your argumentation/evidence are both in need of revising, the odds are good that you weren't entirely clear what you were claiming about the text--i.e., that you were still in the process of developing your ideas about the poem and not quite ready to write a full argumentative essay about it. Is your thesis vague? In what ways? Is it too broad (i.e., does it try to account for too many formal elements of your short poem)? Go back to Eagleton and to the poetry cheat sheet and do some more exploratory writing, if necessary. Reread your draft, then reread the poem. Narrow your focus, if necessary, to only the one or two elements whose workings you understand best (and about which you have the most to say). What details of the poem did you ignore the first tiem around? Why? What happens when you account for them now? What additional insights do they offer? Craft a new thesis that includes specific details about this poem--details that customize your claim to this text, and this text only--and that make a specific claim about how one or more formal elements contribute to the poem's meaning.

• If your thesis is reasonably sound, but the argumentation and evidence were less successful, you may be leaving out important steps in your reasoning about the text, assuming the reader sees what you see in the lines. (I.e., you may be writing for yourself, rather than an audience.) The time that's elapsed since you wrote the paper should help; reread the draft and look for moments whereyour discussion feels shallow, where you can't follow the reasoning that holds one sentence to the next, when you don't fully flesh out your thinking, or where there's more to be said about the details of the text.

• If structure or organization was the big issue for your paper, odds are you tried to structure your paper around one or more specific formal features of verse, rather than the movement of the reader through the poem. That is, if you have paragraphs that begin with sentences like, "Tone is an important aspect of this poem," rather than "In the second stanza, the speaker's tone becomes more urgent," you've likely relied on a less effective organizational strategy. Think about how the reader experiences the poem as they move through it, line by line, stanza by stanza. How does the tone change? What specific details cause the tone to change? What do these changes in tone reveal or signify (and, perhaps, how do they work in tandem with one other formal element to do that)? An explication (another word for a formalist analysis) usually moves through the text systematically. That helps prevent repetition, and it forces you to attend to the details of each stanza or line. Organizing your analysis around formal properties, by contrast, can often lead to vague or confusing claims about the text in general.

II. Determine whether you need only to expand or reorganize, or whether your revision will be substantial enough that you're actually writing a new draft. You may be further ahead thinking of your paper as one more "exploration" of the text. In that case, open a new document and start over.

III. When you have a fairly well developed new draft, take time to gloss it.

Finally, when you proofread your paper, be sure to consult Lit Crit Papers: What Faculty Know but Don't Always Articulate.

When you hand in your revision, you'll need to provide me with the original paper, your notes in response to the questions, and your gloss! If you don't, I won't read it!

Last date to hand this in: Thursday, November 20th.