Every writer experiences the daunting task of writing, revising, perfecting, and completing a paper, essay, or book at some point in life. Whether it is for school or a profession, writing and revising papers will always be a part of life. While writing and revising multiple papers for Written Communications, I learned a lot about my writing style, technique, and revision process. Through complicated steps, I performed both global and local revisions in order to increase the clarity of paper, erase all sentence-level confusions, perfect my ideas, and organize my thoughts into a coherent, unified argument. First and foremost, I performed the global revisions. Global revision includes revising clarity, organization, content, and the unity of paragraphs including the transitions. In my paper, i performed a global revision in the way of paragraph unity and clarity. I made sure each paragraph discussed only one idea and not multiple. One of the most confusing and unclear spots in my analytical paper of the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was the paragraph in which I analyzed the …show more content…
This included eliminating expletives, modifying verbs, examining sentence length, and improving diction. In order to exemplify my writing, I eliminated all expletives (except for the ones used in direct quotes) from my paper. I only found one expletive (“there were”) and it was after the word that in the below sentence. My original sentence read, “By using a well known historical event -- the Holocaust -- King illustrates his point that there were unjust laws placed on Jews during the middle of the 20th century.” After revising it and eliminating expletives, I saw a more concise idea which was, “By using a well known historical event -- the Holocaust -- King illustrates his point that society placed unjust laws on Jews during the middle of the 20th century.” Eliminating the only expletive in my paper helped clear up my
Everybody has their own methods for writing; however, I believe there is always room for improvement. Chapter 3 in Everyone’s an Author has shown me that writing involves processes that need to be mastered through constant practice. It also revealed helpful tips on how to develop writing processes that can help write effective papers.
Throughout my life, I have written multiple papers as assignments while learning throughout the process. Each time, I learnt from my mistakes and capitalized correctly. I’m currently a sophomore in high school; meaning I have plenty of time to expand my word bank and my knowledge on the art of writing. In Peter Elbows, “Writing with Power”, he emphasizes practices and techniques to help one develop into a more complete writer able to produce high quality essays.
To write the perfect paper takes time, revision, and multiple edits. In chapter 15 of Writing Today, by Richard Johnson-Sheehan, Charles Paine, Cathi Shaw, Jordan Stouck, they discuss the process required to edit a paper. The first step is to check if the content is relevant to the audience, specifying the key ideas. Reviewing the whole document to make sure the information match the topic and caters to the audience’s expectations, values, and attitudes, helps eliminate unnecessary writing. (P 308)
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.
Have you ever given much thought about revising your paper? We correct the spelling, fix the grammatical errors, and give it one last read through then we hand it in. Revision is one of the most important pieces when writing an essay, but do we overlook it? I most certainly did until I read Barbra Tomlinson’s essay, “Tuning, Tying, and Training Texts: Metaphors for Revision”. Tomlinson opened my eyes and I see a whole new light when it comes to revising my papers.
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.
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
Typically, when most people think about the writing process they think of terms such as a ‘thesis statement,’ developing an outline, body paragraphs, conclusion; it’s imperative to view writing this way. We have only been taught THIS way of writing almost directly after we learned how to spell words—you decide what to write about, usually specified in the thesis statement, then you write a series of paragraphs entailing how you came to this conclusion. Finally, you conclude your paper by restating exactly what it was you spent an entire essay writing about. And most people will go their entire lives believing that is the formula for an effective, well thought-out work of literature. But how often do we go back and read through our writing and completely resent how amateur and forced it sounds? This is usually a direct result of a lack of revision within a work. Defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “a change or a set of changes that corrects or improves something” and “a new version of something that has been corrected or changed,” Revision is not a common word we think of when writing—this raises a serious question: how should you revise? In response to this to this, research was conducted to find a general view as to the significance of revision within various individual’s writing processes. These results, along with research from several academic articles provide a clear description as to where revision could be
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 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
"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
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.
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.
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
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.