Personal Narrative: My Revision

One of my biggest challenges was accepting the fact that I had numerous habits that I developed in high school which were restricting my creativity. After reading Revising Attitudes by Brock Dethier, I now know that your first draft isn’t meant to be perfect. While writing drafts you need to let it go and not try to perfect anything. A rough draft is called rough for a reason. As a perfectionist, it was hard for me to comprehend the fact that I need to let go. I quickly found out that this would end up being one of my biggest weaknesses. I became frustrated with myself since I couldn’t figure out ways to revise my essay that had obvious problems. I was able to learn from my mistakes from the last assignment and avoid them. I now know to start narrowing your topic down when brainstorming your topic. Then you would continue to be more specific as you do your initial research. This helped me be crystal clear with what I wanted to write about and in the end helped me figure out which claims

In 2025, I will be twenty-nine years old and hopefully married. I will be married to my significant other of ten years Earnest Palmer III, who is a dentist. I would have been recently graduating with a bachelor’s in Culinary Arts and trying to plan to open my own restaurant, BubbaD’s Eateries. Knowing my big headed husband of mine, I probably had a baby then and trying to have another baby. Hopefully, by then Earnest will get rid of the idea naming our son, King. We will be living in the suburbs near New York City but working in the city. Being a woman with great memory, I probably wrote a memoir about my crazy life and trying to sell it to a publisher. If none of the publishers wants to publish my memoir, I will probably sell it the Lifetime

Starting over. Those two simple words pretty much sum up where I am at in my life at the moment. I am a 34 year old mother of three. I have never been to college. My husband just recently left me. It has been a whirlwind summer to say the least, but before I get into what brought me back to school, I'll start at the beginning. I was born in FL., and quite literally spent all my time either at the beach or running bare foot on my grandparents farm. I loved every second. Shortly after I turned 8 my mom met my step-dad, and we were quickly headed on our first big adventure, moving to Texas! While I missed my family in FL., I can not tell you enough how happy I was that my mom married my dad. He has been a rock and solid foundation for me my whole

Prior to taking this class, I would always just complete the number of drafts that my teachers would request. I would simply make the small grammatical edit and not worry too much about the argument or how my prose sounded. Tons of useless filler sentences and unnecessary words filled my papers. That said, no one is ever going to make a perfect paper because writing is not about being perfect. It is an ongoing quest for persistent development of your work and this was crucial for me to realize. I would always assume that my work did not need numerous edits or copious amounts of revision. Looking back, I am not sure if this was because I secretly feared having to correct myself so I deliberately ignored digging through all of the flaws, or that I believed my writing quality would be just sufficient to reach my desired grade. I think the more realistic answer is the former. This semester has encouraged me to break down the stigma around needing to write a perfect paper. It is not happening. Once I came to this conclusion, my reservations about truly analyzing my papers melted away slowly. This testament to the continual process that is writing, though initially tough to deal with, will surely make my writing better and more

It was two months ago when I discussed how big of a change it was for me to enter into a college writing class. Throughout my first semester attending writing 105, I’ve learned to “rise about my limits”. Reading and writing was a tool I always tend to struggle with yet I continued to focus on exceeding pass my goal. Each essay I wrote became better allowing me to not only learn more but grow as a writer. I started off being able to just write two page essays and now I’ve adapted to being able to write 7 pages without losing track. Over the semester my writing has improved due to dedication, having a purpose and analyzing my mistakes.

I personally found that I have improved on my grammar, for example, the appropriate placement of commas, semi-colons, and reducing the run-on sentences that frequented my writing. In the role of a writer, I determined that I wasn’t as far off on my writing skills as I thought, upon entering Mrs. William’s classroom. Furthermore, I learned that I commenced to relish it. It seemed to have liberated me at times. When it comes prewriting for assignments, I generally write my views down on paper by hand. It may be old school, but it is a very effective style for me. I find the words flow more clearly in that respect. Next, I generally wait a day or so before I revisited my sample. This is the time to reread what I had written, often making the essential changes. Then I write the essay in the MLA format, print it, read it, and rectify any punctuation errors. Lastly, time permitting, I would generally wait a day or two afore I returned to my writing for two reasons. One to find supplemental mistakes and/or two to revitalize what I have already wrote. I often altered some of the verbiage to establish I was producing work worth reading. While writing, the mundane mistakes I make are generally punctuation and run on sentences.

I improved as a writer this semester because I became better at composing sentences. I improved not only my grammar but also the content of the sentences and how I articulate my ideas. This portfolio represents an accurate picture of me as a writer, because it shows how I write in an academic setting and the subjects I love. This is apparent in the choices that I made in my selection of writings. However, it could better represent my progress if I had included my scores and comments from all of my assignments. Though, I do believe that this portfolio showcases my progress this semester.

Though I have spent many years learning English, it is an ongoing process that requires a lot of hard work. I was very glad to find out that the first four weeks of the course would be focused on grammatical rules and sentence patterns. Because I never focused on the structure of my sentences, I believe I wrote dull and flat texts. Moreover, my punctuation was terrible since I had no understanding of English punctuation. But the lessons on the sentence structure turned my world upside down: It was hard to believe that even simple sentences have such a great variety and can turn your paper into something very interesting in the terms of structure. Practicing skill of building effective sentences in the same essay was very helpful, for it allowed to focus purely on the sentence and structure patterns rather than on the context. My writing improved since the beginning of the semester and I became a more confident

The first revision strategy will be to obtain reviews from my peers. This method will be beneficial for my large-scale revisions. Fortunately I work at a middle school educators are accessible and happy to review/critique my paper. My goal is to have at least two of the Language Arts teachers look over my essay and provide some insight on what they feel are my strengths and weaknesses. My primary aim with this strategy is to verify that my evidence and thesis are cohesive. Having my peers review my thesis will help me build a tighter main claim with a clear and concise message.

I have modified my writing process since the beginning of the semester. I have always written multiple drafts but if I was lucky I would have someone else read my paper last minute to catch any blatant mistakes. Now I leave myself multiple days to revisit and work on my essay. In this time, I reread my essay, take it to the writing center, then read it one or two more times. The writing center has been extremely beneficial. They read my draft outload and we look for structural organization, grammar errors, and spelling errors. This also allows another perspective to analyze my essays to see if they make sense. Usually I agreed with the constructive criticism and change

I read over the comments you made on the paper at least a dozen times. I took the time to understand what you correcting. I feel that most of my revisions were explaining a little more then I original did.

Throughout high school, I was the student that had good grades and was involved in many activities, but was extremely quiet. I was scared that nobody would like me when, and if, I decided to be outgoing. However, once I got to college, I decided to face my fears and began to be outgoing with new people. If I could get a ‘do-over’, I would have been more outgoing in high school.

This weeks' assignment is on revisions, both large scale and small scale revisions that will aid us in completing our final written essay for this course. Working for many years summarizing with only bullet points and short email sentences has made this difficult assignment for me. The earlier versions of my essay are close to where I am today, but the route I am taking to get to the conclusion is much different than I had originally anticipated. My ideas were scattered and didn’t make sense. The reverse outline helped me focus on my key points tremendously, now I am finding it difficult to have solid topic statements. I also feel that some of my summaries are not relaying my point of view as clearly as I would like. The review process has

So far, the actions that I have began to take have only reprocessed with one major

The questions that I asked myself before revising my rough draft were, what major idea have I left out? Did the reader need more information to understand? Does the paragraph need additional explanations? I realized after asking myself these questions that my essay did need more details to my specific support sentence to clarify what I was trying to say. I added more information to each sentence that I thought could use more to catch my reader’s attention. I made sure each paragraph was written properly to support my sentences.