Pros and Cons of Revision

Revisions help make your writing better. This is fact. The first draft can always be improved upon, and unless you're some sort of pretentious European asshole who died before before any of your work could be published, in which several months after you die, your unpublished work is published as is(i.e. not revised), the first draft usually sucks anyway.

Having an editor helps, as you have one person who really understands what you're doing and what you're attempting to do. This is fine. Revision becomes a terrible experience, I think, in school. You have the professor, who, while maybe not in-tuned to what you want to achieve(because they are dealing with work from about 15 other people), will help you to the best of their ability. But remember those 15 other people? They get to read your work as well, and they get their chance to give their 2 cents, which is, I've learned, not even worth a fraction of that.

You have 15 people all with varying opinions on your work, and they suggest a million things that they want to you do to make the story jive with them. This is frustrating, because when it comes to revise, whose story are you now writing? That talentless loudmouth in the corner's story? The snobby pseudo-intellectual/pseudo-literary snob person who prides themselves over having read William S. Burroughs and Hunter Thompson a million times(and by Burroughs and Thompson, I mean only 2 novels: Fear and Loathing...and Naked Lunch) and hates genre fiction's story? Or are you writing YOUR story?

However, that is kind of an upside to in-class revision, as if you don't get criticism from those people, you get the trivial, incredibly banal criticism from people who don't know any better or the people who don't want to hurt your feelings, so you wind up with a list bullet-points reading "Nice dialogue!" or "This is cliche" or the worst, "I really liked it!" or something equally silly.

Another downside of in-class revision is the time limit. You have a week or 2 days to revise your story. I don't believe you can rush creativity like that. I understand the need for a structured semester and such, but it pains when me when I have a great idea for a revision 3 months after I write something that would have totally benefited the story instead of the forced idea I had to use because I had no choice.

There you go.