Summary Of Joseph Harris Revising

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.

In his article "Coming to Terms", Joseph Harris takes the opportunity to share his knowledge with his readers and discuss things to keep in mind when drafting, revising, and editing assignments. In this specific chapter, Harris explains the revision process and suggest possible preliminary steps to take when formulating an essay. He emphasizes revision as a knowledge practice, in which there is a consistent set of questions you can ask yourself at any point while working on a draft (page 99). In addition, Harris refers the term "writer's project" throughout the section.

Lamott compares the process of writing with the painful process of pulling the teeth. She believes that in order to produce a high quality writing, the author must first put together all their ideas and thoughts in form of the “child draft”. This draft determines the flow and dimension

In Joseph Harris’s chapter “Revising” which was originally published in his book, Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts in 2006, Harris emphasizes the importance of the revising process, how to revise and improve effectively, and informs us about the fact that revising is overlooked and rushed by writers today. He shares tips on how to effectively revise and demonstrates using excerpts within his chapters.

Within the past eight weeks, I have realized my strengths and weaknesses within the writing process. I have realized that I do not utilize the first step within the writing process of prewriting. However, for the drafting, revising, and polishing steps of the writing process, I am very familiar and use additional resources to strengthen the writing assignment. I create multiple drafts, which includes revising and polishing in each step. Therefore, I use all three of these steps in multiple drafts as I reach the final product for

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

In literary education, from childhood to maturity, individuals are taught how to write not to improve themselves as critical thinkers, but to fulfill the requirements given to them in a prompt. Whether to analyze or argue, this form of writing has led to a cease of literary improvement in students today, making many question the effectiveness of writing classes. Mike Bunns, in his article “To Read like a Writer”, explores this topic and stresses the necessity for young readers to critically examine the author’s choices in order to improve their own pieces of work. Bunns effectively argues to his audience of college students that improved comprehension comes from focusing on the rhetorical choices authors decide to make in their compositions by tying personal narratives with repetitive questioning throughout his article.

One’s writing is not always perfect. The idea that perfection lies within a piece of written work is justifiably erroneous. In an excerpt entitled, “Shitty First Drafts” by Anne Lamott, Lamott explores how writing as a whole is a revisiting process. Lamott opens by simply stating, “all good writers write them [shitty first drafts].” She then goes on to address how people view successful writers as enthusiastically approaching writing and that it is ultimately “easy” to compose a piece of work; Lamott states that this notion is merely a “fantasy of the uninitiated.”

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

I observed Dr. Jenny Crisp’s English 98 class on January 19, 2016. The class began at 12:15 PM and lasted until 1:20 PM. The room that the class met in was on the third floor of the Liberal Arts building, and the room had individual computers for each of the students to work on. The class was divided into two sections on this day because Dr. Crisp had scheduled an introductory visit to the writing lab, which began at 12:45. Prior to the visit to the writing lab, Dr. Crisp guided the class in a discussion on the topic of revision in regards to the first paper that the class had submitted. The stages of revision were discussed and the students were shown where additional help could be found within the book. Dr. Crisp told the students that the reason that their grades on the essays were significantly lower was because the essays were lacking in detail and had Type One errors. She stated that revision is important and that could help bring up the grades on the essays.

Metaphor’s for Revision The course of constituting a credible paper by using the writing process lies directly in what the author considers important. The writer’s ideas must relate to the reader in a particular way to encapsulate why distinct ideas must stay, and why some need to go. Barbara Tomlinson gives insight to how the revision process is essential to the success of any writer, while giving various examples that apply to what she claims as a metaphor by which every type of person can agree with. Tomlinson’s text correlates firmly with what Lakoff and Johnson state in their text pertaining to the conceptual mind and how we develop metaphors.

The first semester of W131 has given me the chance to become more familiar with my strengths and weaknesses in my writing process. One of the main things I contribute to my progression in writing is practice and revision. W131 has given me the resources I need to become an effective writer by pushing me to think deeper about what writing process works best for me. To find what writing process works for me, I have experimented with different writing techniques along with alternative reading techniques to allow me to retain more detail. Although I improved some skills during the first half of W131, I still have many skills that could be critiqued to enhance my writing process and essays.

Zinsser’s purpose in comparing his views on the writing process with those of Dr. Brock is to show the student his point of view as a professional writer and to elucidate that the act of writing is not driven by compulsion. Zinsser, who do professional writing as his career state that “rewriting is the essence of writing” (Zinsser 598) to challenge Dr. Brook’s claim that “Whatever form the sentence take will reflect the writer at his most natural” (Zinsser 598). Zinsser pointed out that a professional writer rewrite their sentences over and over again while Dr. Brook, who take writing as his side interest thinks that rewriting is not important. In addition to rewriting as a process of a professional writer, Zinsser also pointed out that emotion

Joseph Harris’ chapter on “Revising,” from his book Rewriting (2006), explores various strategies and tips that students can use to approach a revision for a writing. Joseph Harris is an English professor at the University of Delaware. He also taught writing courses at Duke University and University of Pittsburgh. Harris notes that there are key differences among the labors of writing: drafting, revising, and editing. Drafting involves putting down thoughts on paper or "generating text” (101). Revising involves rethinking and changing significant ideas. On the other hand, editing simply involves making minor tweaks in spelling, grammar, and word choice that do not change the meaning of the paper as a whole. The first step Harris describes is

Revising these six poems was the easiest revision that I have ever completed. This is because of the several stops that I followed while completing my revisions. My first two and most important steps came from lessons that I was taught in class, the next were influenced by what I read in “The Energy of Revision,” and the thoughts and opinions of my classmates.