Over the course of this semester, the way that I write and partake in revisions has drastically improved. For starters, I now create outlines for my revisions, something that I hadn’t thought of doing before. The outline I made for the first project was messy and not exactly clear about what I wanted to work on, compared to the latest outline that I created for my third project. I have learned to take notes about my process as I’m creating my first draft. In doing so, I not only have a clear idea of what I should be working on in my drafts, but I can pinpoint what to focus on during revisions. For example, in my first outline of a revision I talk about how I have a lot of moments in my essay where I start to ramble and kind of lose track of the main point of the paragraph, so I need to go back and “cut some of the nonsense.” This in and of itself isn’t necessarily a bad note, but it lacks any type of specificity and overall isn’t exactly helpful. Comparitvely, in my most recent revision outline I wrote: “I also want to think about making the “I” in my paper even stronger, as some of my thoughts kind of trail off and blend into the author’s (but not in the comparative way, in the I-forgot-what-I-was-saying way) like in the second body paragraph. There are a couple of topic sentences that I want to look at and revise, as well as adding some more analysis to my third body paragraph, pulling more out from the authors themselves.” These revision notes are more helpful to me as they’re more specific to what I should be looking at and reworking. I have picked up on skills globally by looking at my peer’s papers anonymously with the class and annotating their paragraphs. This process helped me grasp how to look at works from an objective *and* subjective standpoint, allowing my local revisions to be more precise and effective.
