Steeping (or, random thoughts while revising an article)

Graduate seminars really don't teach us how to revise articles...nor can they.  In a seminar, the student has ten or fifteen weeks to complete all the necessary research, work up a draft, revise the draft, and then turn in the "finished" copy for a grade.  But such finished copies are themselves still drafts; even a "publishable" seminar paper requires considerable rewriting before it can be submitted to an editor.  On the academic calendar, students rarely have the time to become alienated from their own work, as it were--to read their writing after the heat of composition has faded away.  Distance makes the brain grow more appalled at the logical leaps (perhaps in seven-league boots...), the flawed organization, the missing evidence, and so forth.  Wailing "why on earth did I do that?" is an essential part of the writing process, after all--but it can take weeks, or months, or even a year to see what "that" was. 

(She says, after whacking out six pages, moving paragraphs from the middle to the beginning and vice-versa, redoing the introduction, deleting some secondary sources and adding others...)