(Recursive Process) – Demonstrate the ability to approach writing as a recursive process that requires substantial revision of drafts for content, organization, and clarity (global revision), as well as editing and proofreading (local revision).

To be honest I never really revised my work in high school. I would push my work off to the very last minute and not give myself anytime to make revisions. Also in high school I don’t remember ever going over any kind of revision process we were simply told to revise and just look for mistakes never really specified the different kinds of mistakes/errors or places where we could improve. Anytime in high school that I had a major project I would always ask a family member to revise it for me because I never really knew how to or if I was doing it right. Revising my work has always been a frustrating process for me. When writing essays I would get really caught up and stuck because I would revise every sentence after I wrote it so it would take me forever to write a paragraph. I would mainly do this because I knew that I didn’t want to go back later and take the time later to fix it.

This semester I have definitely come to appreciate the importance of revisions and how big of an impact they have on my writing. Going in with my rough drafts and getting them peer reviewed and seeing the perspectives from different students and Mr. Brod always gave me a lot to work with. I made use of almost every comment that was made on my draft and this helped me with word count significantly it also made my claims much clearer and helped me bring in the authors voices in places I wouldn’t have thought to before one comment that was made on both essay one and two was that I used my voice great but I could incorporate some of the texts better.

A good example of when my revision significantly improved my writing is in this paragraph from Essay #3

As you can see this paragraph is pretty short and kind of all over the place. There some grammars mistakes and incomplete thoughts and overall its just disorganized messy. The advice I got from Mr.Brod to help fix up this paragraph was as follows.

I used a lot of outside references and my own voice in the essay and not enough text throughout the essay something I already knew before receiving this comment but receiving comments like these helped me figure out the specific places in my essay where textual evidence fit well and that was really useful.

As you can see the paragraph is significantly longer and I added quotes from a past source referencing DFW ideas of learning how to think and changing our default setting. I saw adding quotes as an opportunity to make this a Barclay paragraph and I think it worked well in this case and really helped me connect my ideas and makes the whole flow of the paragraph better and less choppy. Therefore making it an easier and more interesting read.