Global Revision

Furthermore, according to Duncan Carter’s article, Five Myths About Writing, “Years of well-intentioned English teachers have responded to students’ first drafts as if they were supposed to have been perfect. Combined with a pedagogy which suggests that revision is a form of punishment, it is not hard to see where students get the idea that good writers don’t have to revise” (Carter, 82). Growing up, high school teachers make it seem as if revising and editing your paper is the worst thing ever. Any student who worked long and hard on their assignment and turned it in to get revised, would hate to receive a paper back with nothing but red marks and errors written all over them. This initially gave people the mindset of forgetting about editing their work if all it did was tear them down and point out their mistakes.

While attending writing class, I learned about the 4 steps in writing, bases for revising, organizing, and connecting specific information, and I also learned about the different types of essays such as descriptive, narrative, process, cause and effect and argumentative essay. I have been a student at Milwaukee Area Technical College for 1 semester, and over the course of my enrollment I have grown and learned more that I knew prior to attending this writing course. Participating in this writing class has taught me so much more than stuff about literature and language, it has taught me another way of expressing myself. I have learned here how to write and express myself, how to think for myself, and how to find the answers to the things that I don 't know. Most importantly I have learned how important technique, outlines and organization are. My goal in this paper is to inform writers about how my writing skills have improved.

The art of writing is a complex and difficult process. Proper writing requires careful planning, revision, and proofreading. Throughout the past semester, the quality of my writing has evolved significantly. At first, I struggled with the separation of different types of paragraphs, and I found writing them laborious. Constant practice, however, has eliminated many of my original difficulties, and helped to inspire confidence in my skills. As a collegiate writer, my strength lies in my clear understanding of the fundamentals of writing, while my primary weakness is proofreading my own work.

In Nancy Sommers’ article, “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers”, she addresses how to different groups, students and experienced writers, go about revising their paper. Sommers method of taking the results of her experience could have been much more effective if she would have added details about certain thing. How did the group’s final papers turn out? Where there significant difference in the final papers, and if so what were they. Did both group turn up with nicely written papers? These questions would have helped to understand the importance of revision toward the creation of the paper, then just the revision stage itself. Sommers mention of how most students repeat themselves in their writings by just

I looked for grammar to start out with which took a little while because I had to check the punctuations and commas and see if they were placed right. Then I checked to see if all the words were spelled right and see if I was missing any words that would make a sentence better within a paragraph. After all of this was done then I went back to see if there were any quotes that needed quotation marks and I even attempted to paraphrase every now and then. That is how I went about revising both my research paper and my analysis

By examining the ideas in the essays Freewriting by Peter Elbow and The Makers Eye: Revising your own manuscripts by Donald Murray. One can gain a better understanding of the process of turning a piece of writing from an inspiration into a craft. By examining the elements lined out in each essay can be beneficial in creating a piece of writing that is beyond a college or student level. Elbows essay lines out the importance of a strong prewriting regimen. That editing too early can ruin writing. He believes that by using the method of free writing, it can inspire ideas that may be limited when worrying about grammar. While Murray emphasizes the necessity to create many drafts to form writing into its full potential. Saying each draft is an opportunity to discover what the author has to say and they the best way to say it. By transforming writing into its maximum potential it goes from being an idea an inspiration a masterpiece.

For the revision project, I needed to make more changes to this paper due to not fully getting my point across or because I needed to add some more information to my paper. The first thing that I had to work out was my title. I read the beginning of my paper again and decided on a better suited title that would fit into what my paper was mostly about. Next, I had to fix a sentence that contradicted what I had said earlier in my paper. Another big issue in my paper was the placement of the story of Dylan Roof. To fix this mistake I used parts of my essay that talked about Dylan Roof to form a back story closer to the beginning of my paper. Some of the other sentences that I had written originally made more sense in my mind and when I put them on paper they made it sound like I was saying something different, so I changed the wording in those sentences.

The three ways I edited my paper to improve it between the first draft and the final draft. First, I changed my paper from present tense to past tense. Next, I removed a sentence in paragraph four because it was similar to another sentence. Then I added transitions at the beginning of the

"Fresh eyes" is another strategy I plan on using. This method will be used for both small and large-scale revisions. For this strategy, I will enlist the help of my daughter. She is a senior in high school in an AP Language Arts class. She has an amazing grasp of sentence structure and

The weakness of my essay on Hawthorne’s characterization of Dimmesdale included a few awkward phrases. Some of the essay also features bombastic language similar to Hawthorne. However, the elaborate words and phrases are indicative of my writing style. One revision to the essay includes changing “As stated by” to “According to” which is a less awkward phrase. I also changed “ransacking” to “forbidding” as it makes more sense contextually in the sentence. Other minute revisions include changing “proclaims” to “states”, and deleting “This quote which” from a sentence to enhance the fluidity of the essay. Finally, “falsely seen” is considered an awkward phrase, and therefore, I changed it to “perceived”. Overall, the essay required only miniscule

In the presentation video, one of the steps in writing a paper I can discuss is proofreading. Proofreading is primarily about searching your essay for errors. Proofreading can be a difficult process, especially when you are not sure to the sentence itself rather than to the ideas of the paper as a whole. One of the best ways I think for all of us in writing process method is to revise; the paper is with their peers. Often when peers revise another person's writing, they can notice quite of few of the mistakes that the original author never would have noticed. Sure, this takes a little extra time, but it pays off in the end. If you know that you have an effective way to catch errors when the paper is almost finished, you can worry less about

Even the smallest changes to a paper can become a great improvement. From the first papers completed at beginning of this course to the last papers submitted far more recently, my sentence structure, grammar, and syntax visibly improved. During the first few weeks of the course I struggled with the exclusion of verbs and tenses I used far more often than I realized. “Using passive voice to avoid attribution is, therefore, a problem. Fortunately, the solution to avoiding passive voice is relatively simple: use active verbs (Smith, 80).” After my professor informed me of my mistakes, I took advantage of the opportunities given to rewrite my papers, even when I received an acceptable grade to begin with. By doing this I found ways to improve my writing even more and followed Mrs. Patria’s guidance until I felt that I completely fulfilled the requirements. An example of this: the four word movie essay written about Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow originally received a grade of ninety percent, but when I chose to rewrite it I managed to bring the grade up to a ninety-five percent as well as learn from my mistakes.

From this process I learned the importance of not adding extra information, reading my story aloud to proofread, and developing my sentences. In my first draft I wrote a lot of unnecessary information which lead my essay to have a number of words that exceeded the word count. This time I made sure to only include information that was necessary. For the first essay, when I was proofreading my work in my head. As a result, I had many typos and missed many errors. On the final project, I read my essay out loud and my proofreading was more efficient. Finally, on my first essay one of my comments was that some of my sentences were choppy, so I made sure that all of my sentences flowed nicely. For my new piece I am especially proud of my

Booth et al. (2008) advise, that readers examine articles by critiquing what is in it for them. “They want to begin with a sense of the whole, its structure, and, most important, why they should read your report in the first place” (Booth, Colomb, & Williams, 2008, p.204). Booth et al. (2008) describe the revision process as a means to engender clarity for the reader in every aspect of the articles structure and syntax. I agree with the authors completely. All too often, I find myself getting caught up in the process of communicating my message that I fail to engage the reader in an “amiable conversation” (Booth, Colomb, and Williams, 2008, p.203). My focus is on ensuring that I work key points and any supporting evidence that I may have

When it comes to my paper, my revision process was different from my papers article. The first thing I did was self-edit/ revision. I started with ten pages, and I edited it down to 8pages. With the peer review, Nick provided me with his great opinion, and that helped me take out redundant information which brought my page count to 6pages. In Office hours, your overview helped me narrow down my page numbers to 4pages. After the office hours, I worked extensively to incorporate your advice into my papers. I followed your advice like going back to add dates in the in-text citations, moving some topics from the different paragraph at various locations and making sure I had the correct citations and references.