Tuning, Tying, and Training Texts

In Barbara Tomlinson’s piece, “Tuning, Tying, and Training Texts” she explains eight different metaphors that relate to how an author revises their writing. I found myself being able to relate to a handful of the metaphors but for this post I chose to discuss Casting and Recasting, Sculpting, and Painting. I related to Casting and Recasting in the way that I sometimes change important aspects of my writings similar to recasting new lead roles. By important aspects I mean things like my introduction or synopsis or things that really stand out to the reader. I found Sculpting and Painting to be things that I relate to with my more of my works than Casting and Recasting. When I being drafting what I try to do is write absolutely every idea I have down however sloppy it may look. Once that is finished, I go through and make the big changes like deleting unneeded paragraphs. Then I go back through and make smaller, finer changes such as changing sentence structure and grammatical errors. That process to me is what I took to be Sculpting.  I took Painting to be something that is similar to Sculpting but more of a “building up” process than a “breaking down”.  When relating painting to my works, I find it to be the process where I go through several times and add layers of information where I feel it is missing. I found Tomlinson’s piece to be an interesting look at the way people revise.

In terms of Wikipedia, the history and discussion tabs are two that definitely give an author or editor ideas or guidance with revising. With “View History”, one can look back and see the types of edits that have been made to the piece. This could help by allowing someone to see what others did to change the article and it could spark ideas. With “Discussion”, one can see what is acceptable and what is expected by the editors of the site and that could help shape what information a writer could use and how they could present it.