I think my most improved and strongest piece would have to be my third writing project. In my first draft, something that I did differently than my last two that I believe made my essay stronger was that I changed my writing strategy. Typically when writing a rough draft I would be so focused on making each paragraph perfect before I moved on to the next and it really affected me when it came to revision because at that point I had already felt like that was the best it was going to be and I just focused on local revision rather than making global changes. I also struggled with time management with my first two papers because I took so much time trying to make it perfect the first time that I didn’t leave myself much time to really focus on revising my work and it showed. With my third paper rough draft, on the other hand, I was finally able to just let myself ramble on and get all of my points across rather than taking large amounts of time with the first draft and I found that I saved myself a lot more time in the long run and I was able to run with many ideas before finding the perfect one. With this new strategy, I found that it made my revision process more effective because I was able to focus on not only local revision, but global revision as well. I thought this did justice to my final draft because I was able to make a lot more changes to get my final paper to where I wanted it to be, whereas with my first two I couldn’t really do that.
I wasn’t able to attend the peer edit workshop we had in class, but I was able to make a lot of changes with the help of the comments of my peers. Some of the big things I was told to focus on were shortening paragraphs, stronger topic sentences, and shortening quotes and strengthening the analyses. These were also some of the things that I personally felt that I needed to work on as well so I spent my revision time focusing on these few things and it helped me realize what I could have been doing with my other papers as well. I ended up splitting up one of my large paragraphs into two separate ones and shortening others by taking out points that didn’t necessarily benefit my paper. With my topic sentences, I realized that I haven’t really been doing them correctly so I focused a good chunk of time on looking up correct ways of writing them and I just kept jotting down ideas until I found ones that satisfied me. Lastly, when focusing on shortening quotes and strengthing the analyses, I made the executive decision to keep the quotes as they were because I felt as though shortening any of them would have diminished the importance of the point I needed to get across. I did though work on my analyses though and explained the quote as much as I could. Overall I think this was my best work just because I was able to learn from the writing process and really focus on some of the more important things and dedicate more time to revision.
