Over the last semester I have been forced to go through a process of revision in my works of writing that I was previously unaccustomed to. The process involves multiple rewrites, peer editing, and self-revision. It takes significantly longer to finish writing anything but I have seen great improvement in the quality of my work. This new and lengthy revision process forces me to re-evaluate my thesis statement several times as I write. My body paragraphs often go through the most significant change through out my essay so my thesis must adapt to tie together all of the body paragraphs. Typically my thesis would be re-written for every draft. Unfortunately
My new process of drafting and revision has three stages, each one taking a week to allow myself time to distance myself from the essay to take on new perspectives and come up with new ideas. For my first draft I don’t bother with writing any introductory pieces or making a conclusion. I always write a short thesis instead just to keep my writing on topic but as I explained is in no way permanent. The way I think of it I’m simply rambling and writing whatever comes to mind for about 1000 words and then I call it quits. Once this first draft is finished I let my peers go through it and tear it up, which they do. All I want to see from them is what ideas they liked and what ideas they thought didn’t fit. The first essay I wrote this year was an explanation of how I go through the process of writing. It had been about four months since I had to write an academic paper and I had no idea what I was doing. In what I submitted as my first draft I had five different ideas all vying for attention. If I hadn’t had someone go through my essay and told me what worked and didn’t I probably couldn’t have gotten through the paper. Once I get through this step I make an outline using the good paragraphs and then just cut out the ones that don’t fit.
After I’ve made an outline from my strong paragraphs I go back in to re-write my main ideas and to add more examples, detail, and also to make sure that everything conforms to a central Idea. Typically this is the last step before I go in and fix all of my grammatical and sentence flow errors. I wasn’t a fan of writing this way at first but there is a clear difference in my writing now than at the end of high school. My arguments and ideas are presented in a much more intelligent way and I am much better about being able to flow from idea to idea and paragraph to paragraph.
I quit writing introductions to start my essays, instead waiting until my body paragraphs have been written and then using the sum of their parts to decide on what my central thesis for the essay should be. All of the introductions I had written never matched up with my body paragraphs so I had to go back in and rewrite them every time. It saves time for me and also allows me more room to write in for my body paragraphs because I am no longer trying to write them to a pre-established central theme that may not reflect my thoughts by the end of the writing process. If I hadn’t have taken one last look over my essay on conventions of the western genre I would have actually forgotten to write a conclusion.
I still need to work on my ability to present my ideas in a more detailed manner and to do a better job of going in depth so that I can describe them to their full complexity. There are definitely times when ideas don’t come to fruition when I write. I believe that it is just an issue of revising. With every revision my work becomes a little bit better, and usually taking a few days between revisions helps even more. Taking a little bit of time off lets me generate new ideas and approach my work from different angles when I edit.
There is no issue in my ability to present my ideas but when it comes time to go into their individual details I believe that I need to provide more direct examples and still need to elaborate and clarify my ideas at a higher level. In my essay on genres I believe that I provided too few examples form western films. Not only that, I needed to do a better job of setting up the scenes in the essay so that the reader could understand what I was talking about. Since film is a visual art there would have been plenty of opportunities for me to provide descriptive detail, however I just
I think that if I can learn to write less in generalizations and focus on distinct incidents I will be able to improve my clarity and come to a sharper conclusion than before. I felt myself getting closer to do this when I wrote my discourse community ethnography because I had to be so specific on my topic. I started out writing in very broad terms talking about all of baseball as a central theme, but then I realized the best way that I could explain things and demonstrate to my readers what the true conventions of baseball were could only come through focusing on a team I had played. It had to be this way for two reasons. First off I had direct experience with the team and therefore could speak directly to it and secondly I was able to focus on the behaviors of my teammates which was much easier than the behaviors of athletes in the entire sport.