You did it! You submitted a revised draft of a major writing project for this course (or, you are at least most of the way there). Feel good about it.
Hopefully, you changed quite a bit to align with what you wanted to do better in the piece compared to what you did in the first draft. I hope you also consulted the Revision Plan Guidelines (Learning Module 6 cover this in the revision plan and in considering online and blog writing) and feedback you got on the first draft.
Now that it is done, though, let’s take a moment to think about what you did and where you are going next.
There are two tasks to do on this page.
First, comment below on what you were trying to do in your revision:
- Where did you focus your energy most? What were you trying to differently in the most drastic way of all the changes you made? Why? How did you do that? How did you feel about it?
- What do you love most about this revision? What are you most proud of?
- What helped you the most when revising? (e.g., models of blogs, examples from class, feedback from your Writing Group, a realization you had, how you structured a Writing Session). Be specific! (e.g., mention a specific comment from a person in your Writing Group)
Second, go to our Slack workspace and in the #writing-practice-and-process channel, post about the following:
- Talk about 2-3 goals that you would like to work on for your writing. Interpret this however you’d like. It can be related to anything about writing–style level concerns, organization, argument, using examples, your writing process, your writing practice, etc. Be specific!!!!!!!!! (say more than just picking 2-3 of the things I just listed and copy/pasting them)
- Respond to others! Read previous posts before you write your own post. If you notice someone has a similar post, comment directly to them and expand on their points if you had similar goals. Prioritize talking about your goals that way rather than formally listing all of your goals.
Once you have completed these two tasks, click on the “Click here to continue” button below.
I focused mainly on changing my thesis to make it more specific. To do that, I reread my essay a few times to get the gist of what I wanted to convey to my audience. After that, I summarized the specifics and molded my thesis accordingly. When the thesis was mostly done, I felt that the most important step was taken care of, and then I just needed to adjust everything else with consideration for the thesis.
I enjoyed the realization that I have improved my essay by a ton. After finishing the first draft. I thought that my essay was at least 90% finished. It turned out to be something like 50%. So although the revision process was time-consuming, I am glad I realized that my room for improvement was much greater than what I expected.
What helped me the most was writing sessions. Personally, I find working on an essays for hours at a time painful. By allotting 30 minutes to 1 hour every day to work on my rhetorical analysis, I eased the revision process by a whole lot.
My focus on the revision was defining the structure as a whole. I felt that most of my actual writing was done in the first draft and I needed to work on cohesion. After looking at the feedback and reading it again, I decided to center everything around the strongest parts of my evidence and analysis.
I think I’m most proud of the way I came into the assignment with a strategy and executed it. The actual text that I analyzed wasn’t much (a 4 minute song with only a handful of unique lines), but there was a good amount of background behind the subject matter and the band.
I approached my writing with a narration style, trying to add character to my phrasing and structuring my sentences and paragraphs to make them more interesting to read. Watching videos helped me understand how a script can be written to make delivery of information more engaging. I also felt that it was helpful to write in bursts after pausing for new ideas. Those pauses lead me to organize everything in a more satisfying way.
On my Rhetorical Analysis, I focused more on making it more about analysis instead of a research type question that I proposed in my orignal draft. I tried to fix each paragraph to further explain important scenes and explain why they conveyed certain points.
The one thing that I like about the revision was how It looked once I submitted it into our class page, the addition of images and the links in the analysis made it seem complete.
One thing that helped me in my revision was meeting with Mr.Libertz to ask about some questions that I had and they were able to clear up many points. I learned that my original essay had some flaws and they would drastically increase my grade.
For my revisions of the Rhetorical Analysis, I focused majorly on the structure and organization of the paper. One of my peers had mentioned that the first draft had extremely dense paragraphs that were difficult to understand because there was so much content. I used example blogs to try to break up the text so it was easier on the eyes and thus easier to grasp. In the end, I liked how breaking up the paragraphs and adding pictures made the text look nicer and interesting as a whole.
The thing I focused my energy the most on was making my thesis more explicit as well as connecting my paragraphs to the central ideas of my thesis. I did this by expanding and being more clear in what I meant by it instead of hiding it within the text. Also in the paragraphs, I made a greater effort to connect the idea expressed on them to the thesis.
In the end, the overall format did end up looking like a blog-post and I’m glad I was able to find things to turn into hyperlinks – I thought there was none. I do feel I went a little overboard with the word count but I really felt that I needed to explain the situation for the reader to gain a full understanding of my analysis.
What helped me the most was probably Mr. Libertz’s feedback and low-key advice which gives me an idea of where I needed to strenghten my text.
In revising my rhetorical analysis draft, I focused most of most of my energy on connecting the whole of my essay to the thesis statement. This meant that I had to revise the thesis statement as well to make it more reflective of my arguments.
The thing I love about the revision is that it offers an opportunity to improve on the aspects of the first draft that I did not get right.
What helped me the most when revising is the feedback I received both from my writing group and from the instructor. For instance, the instructor asked me to spread my ideas around the paper instead of limiting some of them to a single paragraph.
I focused the majority of my energy for this essay on making it less argumentative and more rhetorical. A lot of the time I was responding to the author’s opinions with my own, so instead, I chose to talk about how he makes his points. The other thing I focused on was including more detailed evidence to support my claims.
The thing I loved about this revision was the fact that it wasn’t timed. In high school, we only ever wrote rhetorical analysises that had a 40 minute time limit. By having as much time as I needed, I was able to really think about the techniques that the author used.
Feedback is definitely the most helpful thing that improved my essay the most. I like that you give advice on specific parts, but also that you talk about the essay as a whole at the end.
For the revision, I focused most of my energy on changing the parts where I mostly summarized to why the author chose to do what they did and tried to take more of the analysis route.
If I am being honest, I would not say I love this piece but I am also not disappointed in it. I did go back and tried to change it more into an analysis, but I realized I did not choice the best article to 1) analyze and 2) to come up with a thesis for it and argue it.
The feedback I got from my first draft. I did not even see the issue with it before I got feedback from both the professor and my peers.
For my revision I really focused on my formatting and writing style. After doing my first draft, I knew what I wanted to say and how much time I wanted to spend on each topic. Going into making my final draft I wanted to make my writing suitable for a blog post. I am most proud of the the way my piece is written. I sometimes struggle with flow and I think I made my writing flow very well. What helped me a great deal is examples from my peers.
I mainly tried adding more detail and expanding upon existing ideas in my writing. I had a good foundation of a paper but was missing some convincing key points and analysis that I feel I added after our most recent revision. I am most proud of how my paper came out and how I improved my writing over time. Feedback from my writing group and examples in class helped me a lot during the revision process.
During the revision I focused a lot on my organization of the material I had. I also tried to make it easier and more entertaining for the audience to read. When putting the analysis on our site I enjoyed adding the hyper links and photos.