Reflective Essay

Revision is at the core of all great writing. No writer, no matter how good writes something incredible on his or her first try. It takes time to develop a writing; mistakes are made regardless of how good you are at writing. Me being one of these imperfect people, my work from the second half of the quarter was filled with different mistakes and errors but the revision process helped me see where I was making these errors and how to fix them in the future.

Many of the errors I had made in my writing were grammatical errors. Most were easily avoidable and had to do with wrong word agreement. In some of the longer prompts and writings, there were sentences that just did not make sense because all of the words were not in the same tense as one another. I think that this is due to the fact that I wrote some of the prompts and then just submitted them without checking over anything. This can be fixed though by just re-reading my work after it is finished. There were also problems with punctuation specifically commas and semi-colons. I overuse semi-colons and use commas where they are not needed or not using them when they are needed. Just re-reading what I write and checking to see if everything sounds right can also solve this.

Only two of the three revisions really needed new information. I went back and added more to the biographies of Orwell and Vonnegut for the dialogue and added more to actual talking parts. The long sentence was the hardest to add to; I did not know whether to start the piece with what I had already written or end it with it. I ended up sticking it in the middle and developing a beginning and ending that sort of revolved around the one sentence that I had written. I am proud of what I wrote because I tried to be creative with what I was writing and make it as interesting as possible. Some new information was added to the piece on running but it consisted mostly of rewording and fixing grammatical errors.

Everything that I revised was made more specific, accurate, and complex just by adding detail. Detail is at the core of the revision process. After I eliminated many of the grammatical errors and re-read through everything to make sure that it made sense, I went back and added more detail to the pieces. Adding more detail can help immerse the reader into the story or the writing and help get the point across of the writer. This can be as simple as changing a very bland or vague word to something more detailed that can help the reader visualize the scene. I tried to add different descriptive adjectives where I could or just try and take more time to set a scene or go into detail about something. My peers also gave advice that really helped with the revision process. During week 9 where we were looking over each other’s work, Megan gave me very good advice that helped with me making my writing better. Peer advice can be the best advice because it is coming from another person who is in a similar mindset as you.