This was a very interesting exercise, and ultimately one of the mosty effective workshops we have had so far. My partner has not returned my revised essay back to me, and although I wil certainly be considering his opinions, this workshopped has given an eagle’s eye view already of all the revisions I need to make. The process of reverse outlining, helped tease out the core ideas and from an reverse-outline model, ideas can be processed with more ease – the sequence of body paragraphs, the consolidating of ideas, the omission of the deadweight. Deducing an academic essay to its core thoughts, and corresponding explanation of how it “advances the idea” gives an objective to every constituting sentence/thought, providing essentially every point a revision aims to improve. There is almost no excuse, by now, with this workshop.
Just like we are told to do in our essays, it was easy to forget to relate corresponding dots to the central one – I did not give strong presence to the tip of “close-reading” in essay writing. I know to include more direct textual citations and interpretations thereof that strengthen my central presentation of ideas. Besides that, consolidating and sequentially rearranging the body thoughts will be give a stronger flow and development of my ideas.
One of the most interesting moments that happened to me was when the prompt asks the revisor to predict what will follow the thesis, and the resulting body paragraphs were a far cry from what I had a predicted (even though it could have worked, in this instance it did not.) The art of academic essay writing is more welcoming, due to the demystifying effect of working with essay writing. It is becoming a more familiar concept and one that I am beginning to becoming confident trying to grasp a hold of.
