Outcome I – 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).
Looking back on my final paper, my Literacy Narrative Analysis, I looked for differences in the versions from the first draft to the final draft. When viewing them side by side, I found that there was a complete overhaul in the direction I was taking the paper and the overall structure.
In the introduction, I had initially had more of a standard introduction, where I attempted to set up the paper minimally while not giving too much away from each of the authors and their viewpoints, but what I found was that it is more effective to introduce the authors’ core ideas in terms of their relevance to my thesis in order to create a connection early on, rather than waiting until my body paragraphs to really introduce the ideas of the authors. I also utilized the rest of my body paragraphs to create a more clear thesis statement that worked better than the original one. Here was where I utilized some reorganization techniques to cut and switch my body author introductory paragraphs around the paper and put them where I think they would work best.
In terms of evidence and explanations in my paper, from my first to final draft I worked a lot on the connection between quotes, and how the body paragraphs were set up. I had initially followed a quote-explanation-quote-etc.. format and I switched the format to be less monotonous and have more life in the writing. I had to reorganize the way that the quotes and analysis were present in my paper, and I developed the connections between them further than I had initially by better explaining quotes before I inserted my own opinion.
A lot of the new paragraphs I added to my paper were actually derivative of ideas presented to me by my peers for allowing better ideas to come out of the paper. For example, I had primarily focused on narratives that had a negative outcome, and one of my peers suggested I use a positive/neutral ideological narrative to contrast with the others, and I feel that this added a lot of depth to my paper that was not there before.
Some of the smaller revisions that I tweaked were simple grammatical in-text work. For example, I learned that the titles of author’s work is to be quoted, rather than italicized, which I had done previously.
Overall, I found that my ability to tweak and go through with a fine tooth comb has improved drastically over the course of the semester, as I have learned a lot of little things here and there that have contributed to higher quality writing.
