"When Can I Stop Rewriting?"

"Everyone knows" that rewriting is an essential part of writing--but as is often the case with what "everyone knows" we very rarely discuss it in an honest, helpful, way.

Consider, for instance, the matter of when it is that we ought to stop rewriting. Per the low expectations weary and cynical instructors tend to have of students the stress is on exhorting the rewriter to greater effort--rather than helping them make useful judgments about the very important matter of whether they have reached or even surpassed the point at which "more effort" is useless, or even counterproductive.

For my part I find that a point comes in my own writing when, as I reread and revise my work, I am no longer making "global" revisions, and the changes are all occurring at lower and lower levels--restructuring a paragraph here, later just restructuring sentences, later just tinkering with word choices.

All of this tends to reflect the fact that I am no longer revising what I say, but rather how I say it, and, with due regard for the importance of subtleties, smaller and smaller aspects of that. Indeed, rather than meaning I may by that point be thinking about niceties of form--the adjustments about switching something written in passive voice to active voice, or providing parallelism where it had been absent.

And while I am at it many of the changes may feel optional rather than strictly necessary--such that I find myself changing something, then rereading it, and deciding that it was better before.

Alternatively if I am still thinking about substantive changes late in the process it is likely that they suggest not a revision of the piece but a whole other piece than the one that I have written--one I might as well go ahead and write from scratch rather than going through the less efficient, more wasteful process of tearing up something that may be perfectly fine as is to produce something else out of the parts.

I think it safe to say that when you get to either of these points--the point at which the changes are increasingly minute, stylistic, optional; or at which the changes are not so much revision of what exists as writing something else (and again, this better done from scratch)--that you can take it as a good sign that you are getting near the end of the process.