The Writing A Great Swoosh Of Energy

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.

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 “They Say I Say”, chapter 11 may perhaps be the most important chapter in the entire book. Chapter 11 emphases on how important it is to revise and edit your writing. Some students may say that reading over you essay and getting somebody to edit it is pointless but I think that it’s a vital step. It’s simple. Revision and editing could turn your awful essay into a superior essay. When I read over my work I always consider changing it to improve it, should I add more complex sentences? “What [do I] need to do to make it better” (Graff 139). In addition, I would constantly find grammar and punctuation errors that weakened my essay. After I guaranteed that there were no more grammar mistakes my student editor would find one.

During the beginning of the English 101 when we began the writing process: I thought at first that we spent too much time on our essays but I soon realized how important it was spending time on the essays to improve them . The revisions that my teacher and classmates made on my essays were truly helpful for me because it allowed me to better my writing. For every week in the entire course we went over the MLA formatting process, annotating, citing within the essay, and how to make the paper flow better. I had the most troubles in this quarter when I started writing some of my essays for my portfolio because I didn’t have a clue how to start them at first. After a while of brainstorming ideas and seeing examples the teacher

From the start of reading “Shitty first drafts” I have concluded that even the best writers, write horrible drafts first. In the passage it even says when you start off with a shitty first draft, this is how they end up with good second grafts, and terrific third drafts. This shows that a lot of effort goes into writing an essay. You have to start from somewhere, put what comes to your mind immediately on paper. It suprises me that even professional writers struggle with writing rough drafts. The author talks about when you write a rough draft, you have to take bits and pieces of the essay out.

In his essay “No Edit”, Randy Cohen, former writer of the New York Times’ “Ethicist” column, addresses the issue of whether teachers should edit college-application essays for their students. Mr. Cohen, who is clearly in opposition, also offers a counterpoint to his opinion by including several statements from Jeffrey Brenzel, dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale. Mr. Brenzels’ stance is firmly in the affirmative, “I would think it foolish of a student not to have an essay proofed for spelling, grammar and syntax by someone competent to do so. We are not looking to take the measure of writing ability, genius or cleverness. We simply want to know something about personal outlook and perspective-how a student sees things or what a

Once a writer has completed the writing portion of an essay, it is often considered to be done. However, no one, even a professional writer, writes a perfect draft on the first attempt; in fact, it is often this revision stage of writing where a good writer separates himself from other, less experienced writers. A good writer understands the importance of revision and spends as much time as possible during this stage to craft the essay into the ideal state. Moreover, what exactly revision is? Revision refers to the changes that occur in an essay once

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

Students might be afforded the opportunity to rewrite their essays or revise their in-class paraphrases after participating in classroom discussion, allowing them to refashion both their understanding of the text and their expression of that understanding.

In addition to reviewing and rewriting, one example that Murray portrays is the lack of motivation that most students these days have when it comes to writing more than one draft and re-editing or rewriting. In the article, Murray mentions Peter F. Drucker who stated that his first draft was “the zero draft.” I believe when students hear they have to write multiple drafts, they usually give up by the end of the first draft. Most of the time, the first draft is where students put down all the ideas they find or have, however with more drafts students aren’t really intrigued in finding more information. Particularly in elementary school, my teachers made

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.

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.

Coming into this class, I wasn't sure what to expect. Of course,I expected to be writing a lot but was unsure of the type of writing and the style. I was looking forward to writing challenging pieces that stretching me creatively as a writer. I wanted to explore how to express myself in my writing because it had been a long time since I'd written a creative essay. One of my main hopes for this class was challenging myself to become a better editor of my own papers. I often find it a tedious and laborious process to find and edit the grammatical errors in my papers. However, this is an important skill that I need to develop for my future as a successful writer.

Heavy grammar and style comments on a student’s early draft show that surface is the most important part. Some problems students find include word repetition, and when students don’t face the problems, they may replace the offending words with synonyms (Haar & Horning, 2006). When teachers reviewed my early drafts on past papers especially in writing classes, I found the process overwhelming. In previous writing classes I have used word repetition and synonyms in my papers. Revision means correcting repetition, better word usage, and to recognize synonyms aren’t always good word replacements with draft revisions. Using synonyms means adding a replacement word which essentially means the same, except the word may sound or look better. Less repetition and synonym usage is better when correcting drafts, because there are other alternatives. Also in Revision: History, Theory, and Practice, the chapter Definitions and Distinctions also talks about revision, images, and voices. “Revision means movement: turning from self to reader; drafting up and down, out and in; heeding interior and exterior voices. These images of movement witness to the active, fluid thinking of revision, its creativeness, and its multiple, interconnected tasks” (Haar, 2006, 14). Revising and editing are just as important as the written words themselves and the content

The in-class editing workshop assigned for the second essay proved to be very beneficial, and useful for me in my editing process and in assisting me in enhancing my essay. Initially I had this preconceived notation that the workshop would be useless, and I would attain no benefit from participating in it; as well the feedback I would receive would be poor and unhelpful. However, I was presently surprised from the outcome of the workshop, and the feedback I was able to attain through my participation. The workshop was extremely well organized and it was nice that there was transparency in the expectation of the editing by the peer. These guided instructions helped in my peers constructing extremely useful and helpful suggestions of improvement