Formats›A revision in public, in five lines

A revision in public, in five lines

A reusable format for teaching. Take it, fill it, use it again — once per revision, whenever you have said something in front of people and it turns out to need changing.

Download public-revision-format.md The file you fill in. Plain text — open it in any editor, or hand it to an agent.

What this is for

This is for going back to the same room and revising something you said there. Not clarifying it, not adding nuance to it, not letting it quietly fall out of use. Saying, to the people who heard it: I said this, I have thought about it since, and it is not right as it stands.

The reason to do it deliberately rather than as it occurs to you is that the pair is the teaching. A claim alone is a position, and a position delivered by somebody who marks your work is very hard to argue with. A claim followed by its public revision is a demonstration that thinking is a process rather than a product, and it is close to the only way to show that, because a finished argument has had the process sanded off it.

Where this comes from: a position of mine about teaching by thinking out loud — the room watches the thought arrive rather than receiving the conclusion. There is no public source for it.

What it protects against is a specific failure with no symptoms. A claim that was over-reached and never revisited does not decay. It sits in the notes of everybody who was in the room, in the form it had on the day, with the authority of the person who said it. Nothing marks it as superseded, because the person who would mark it has moved on and does not remember saying it that strongly.

The format

SAID       the claim as you actually made it, in your words, not softened

THE GAP    what happened between saying it and coming back
RETURNED   the revision, to the same people, named as a revision
THE PAIR   what the two together show that neither shows alone

NOT THIS   what it looks like when the revision has become a correction
           issued from outside

The claim, the interval, the return, and what the pair is for.

What each line is asking

SAID. The claim as you actually made it. Not the reasonable version you would defend now — the sentence as it left you, including the part that was too strong. Writing it down softened is the whole failure in miniature, because the softened version needs no revision and the exercise ends there. If you cannot remember the wording, say so and give the shape of it; an approximation marked as one is honest and a tidy reconstruction is not.

THE GAP. What happened between saying it and coming back. Usually a night. Sometimes a question from somebody in the room, sometimes nothing at all except the sentence continuing to sound wrong. Name the interval and what filled it, because it is the part a listener cannot see and it is what distinguishes a revision from a mood. A revision arrived at over a night is a different object from one produced under pressure in the same session.

RETURNED. The revision, said to the same people, in the same room, and named as a revision of your own claim. The naming is the line. I want to add something to what I said yesterday is a clarification and preserves the original intact. Yesterday I said something that might not be true withdraws it. Only the second one teaches anything, and only the second one costs you anything, which is not a coincidence.

THE PAIR. What the two together show that neither shows alone. This is written for you, not said in the room. The over-reach alone shows a strong position. The revision alone shows a careful one. The pair shows that a thought can be interesting and wrong at the same time, and that revising is rigour rather than retreat — and a room that has watched it once will argue with you differently afterwards.

NOT THIS. What it looks like when the revision has become a correction issued from outside. Written once and kept. The usual shape is that the revision arrives in a different register from the claim: the claim was live and unguarded, the revision is careful, administrative and slightly defensive, as though somebody else had found the error and you were reporting compliance.

A worked one

SAID       "You have no right to be here by default. You have to earn
           the room." Said flat, in the middle of a crit, to a group
           that had gone quiet.

THE GAP    One night. Nothing new happened; the sentence just kept
           sounding like something said to win a room rather than
           something believed.

RETURNED   Next morning, same room, first thing: "Yesterday I said you
           have to earn the room. I think that is wrong, or at least
           it is not the whole of it. I was making survival sound more
           important than being yourself, and I do not think it is."

THE PAIR   The first sentence is a hard position and it landed. The
           second withdraws it in front of the same people. Together
           they show a claim being held up to the light and found
           wanting, which is the thing I am actually trying to teach
           and cannot teach by asserting it.

NOT THIS   If RETURNED had begun "to build on what we discussed
           yesterday", the first claim would still be standing, and
           the room would have learned that positions get extended
           and never dropped.

THE GAP is the line that stops this being a performance. Nothing new happened is the honest entry and the useful one: the revision came from sitting with the sentence rather than from being corrected, and saying so is what makes the practice repeatable rather than dependent on somebody catching you.

How to use it

  1. Write SAID the same day, before the wording goes. Within a night the sentence begins to be remembered as the more defensible version, and you will revise something you did not say.
  2. Return to the same room, in person, at the start. Not by email, not at the end, not to a subset. A revision delivered anywhere other than where the claim landed reaches fewer people than the claim did, which leaves the claim ahead.
  3. Name it as a revision in the first sentence. Before the reasoning, before the qualification. If the naming comes last, everything before it is heard as elaboration of the original.
  4. Do not delete the first claim. Not in your slides, not in your notes, not in what you say afterwards. The pair is the object; a tidied record leaves only a position that was always careful, which teaches nothing.
  5. Keep THE PAIR to yourself. Explaining in the room what the revision demonstrates converts it into a lesson about your own honesty, and the demonstration stops working the moment it is announced.

Three ways it goes wrong

It becomes a habit. A teacher who revises something every week is not thinking out loud; they are performing revision, and the room learns to wait for the retraction rather than to engage with the claim. This is for the claims that were actually wrong.

The revision is safer than the claim. The over-reach was alive and the correction is careful, so what the room sees is that saying something strongly gets punished. If the revision cannot be said with the same energy as the claim, it is not finished.

It is used to recover ground. The revision names a small part of the claim as wrong in order to protect the rest of it, and everybody can tell. A revision that leaves you better defended than before is a manoeuvre, and it costs more credit than the original error did.

Prayas Abhinav. Licensed CC BY 4.0 — copy it, change it, build on it, including commercially. Say where it came from, and if you changed it.

Take a copy: public-revision-format.md. Yours to alter.