When I was in elementary school, I first learned about the writing process. We learned that first, you brainstorm, then, you write, and lastly, you revise it. The brainstorm and writing steps were easy, however, the revision part was tough. No one really knew what we were revising and we never really knew how to. This year in English 110 was the first time that I actually learned how to revise and properly critique my own work. Elisha Emerson taught me this semester that a “formal draft” can have anywhere between 2 or 60 revisions, and I really took that with a grain of salt throughout this semester. It helped me to realize that my writing is never going to be perfect but it will be the best I can make by using the recursive writing process.
The first ever paper we wrote in this class was where I had the most revisions and edits, so I decided to choose this paper to discuss. Between my free draft and formal draft, I had 91 edts which is very fascinating. I thought that my paper was really good the first time I wrote it, and then when I went to revise it, I noticed a lot of mistakes and places where I can better support my argument. After revising my paper for a second time, I noticed that there was still a lot of potential. While doing this revision process, I began to notice that I have a certain strategy that I use to edit my papers. I first look at the essay as a whole and look at how I organize my paragraphs, which is global editing. I make sure that the paragraphs have the right format and structure. I then go onto local editing, which consists of proofreading, changing grammer, and editing sentence structure. While revising the free draft of this essay, I did a lot of global edits at first because we were introduced to new types of paragraphs, such as the Barclay and TRIAC structure.
“You could say, “cancer is like a war” or “cancer is like a virus” and the patient is going to have two completely different interpretations on what cancer is like.” This was written in my free draft and I revised it to, “You could say, “cancer is like a war” or “cancer is like a virus” and the patient is going to have two completely different interpretations on what cancer is like because the words “virus” and “war” have very different meanings.” This edit really shows how editing can affect your essay. As a writer, it is hard to read your own writing from someone else’s perspective. It is really important that I added how the two different interpretations were different because the readers could have been very confused.
