Writing Reflection

Revising has always been part of my development process for writing. When I was taught by my high school teachers to use “linear structure” in AP Language and Literature, I felt my ideas and skills were restricted. Like Nancy Sommers states in her essay, “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers,” I too believe that the process of rewriting is not only an opportunity to edit technical errors, but also to “discover meaning altogether” (384). The original drafts of my first two essays were merely a translation of outlined ideas into vaguely structured paragraphs with multiple grammatical errors. I highly value revising because the more I reconsider aspects of my essays, the more clearly I understand how to communicate
This was probably due to my lack of writing practice during the summer break before college. I felt it was necessary to constantly re-write my ideas for clarity and to reflect what I wanted to say (382). Even once I clearly outlined my ideas into an essay, I found it necessary to reorganize my thoughts and expand on some ideas, while spending less time elaborating on others (381). In my second body paragraph I found myself incorporating the idea of my limitation “to participate in activities” with the topic of finding it difficult to “incorporate time to take care of myself” in the same paragraph. These are obviously both very different topics to bring into one enormous body paragraph, so combining them made it appear like I was listing all my problems in a diary entry. To fix that problem, I expanded on my thoughts regarding the effects exhaustion from school in another paragraph following the one about my social expectations. This helped create a strong flow of ideas and clear transitions which I continued checking for throughout the rest of my
Fortunately, these mistakes took less time to fix. I constantly positioned commas before and after embedded quotes in continuous sentences, where commas are not necessary. For example, I wrote: “According to Tompkins, understanding that, “facts...are only the product of a perspective,” helps us understand how texts can persuade us.” To fix this sentence, I removed the commas introducing and closing the direct quote because I only need to put commas before and after the quote if it is a separate point from what I am saying. I also confused the situations in which I should use affect versus effect. I originally wrote, “...receiving the desired affect that the intended audience would gain,” when I should have used “effect” since I am referring to the effect as a noun not a verb. Lastly, another problem I found myself making was adding extra words in efforts to create structurally parallel sentences. For instance, I included “the” in front of “Europeans and Native Americans,” when it was not essential to keep the sentence in parallel structure. Removing duplicate words like this made my essay easier to read. Grammatical errors are something that I will always have difficulty with while writing, yet through extra practice I am slowly learning to avoid these