- “…For most of us revision is the only road to success.” Revision is an inevitable stepping stone in writing a good paper. Through the development of ideas, revision is a crucial step in every good writing. I’d like to think of this like finding a job, where your final complete paper is like your final secure job at the peak of your career, that you start at around age 40-50 and remain at until retirement. Meanwhile, all your previous jobs from when you graduated college to the final job are stepping stones like revision. At these stepping stones, your building work experience, insight, and reflection that will all lead to and benefit your final task, the job or your final paper.
- A metaphor I use to think of revisions is creating a recipe. Creating a recipe is like writing a paper, making something out of nothing but concepts and elements to add. Because I am well versed in the baking aspect of the culinary world, I’m going to use a cake recipe as an example. Lets say that we’re creating a chocolate cake recipe as a metaphor of writing an essay. In efforts to create a good recipe compared to all the others out there, we must go through trial and error, adjusting ratios, and taste testing. Each time we bake a new batch its like another draft, and each taste test is like our peers reading over our writing. When we adjust the recipe, the amount of butter, sugar, flour, and eggs, it’s our revision. Just like we adjust the ratio of the ingredients, we adjust the content of our paper, where things belong, where there’s too much of one idea, where there’s not enough and needs explanation. So just like we add or reduce the amounts of each ingredient in our cake recipe to make it delicious, we elaborate or omit ideas and bits of our writing in our paper in order to make it the best that it can be.
- “A piece of writing is never finished.” Just like how we as humans are not perfect, our writing pieces are never finished. To say that it is finished at and given point is to say that it is the best that it can possibly be. But is it? Is the writing the best that it can ever be, or is it only the best that we could make it in the time (time-frame) that we have given ourselves to get it done. Similar to the popular saying, “You learn something new everyday,” we can always improve our paper just as we can always acquire more information, even when we think we’ve reached 100%. So long as we spend more time looking at it, whether with a cleared head or new set of eye, there are always changes to be made.
Identity, Rhetoric & Propaganda in the "Fake News" Era
ENG 2100: JMWA f18 Baruch College
