Learning Outcome 1

At the beginning of the semester I was not necessarily sure about how we would be revising in this course. Over the semester we learned a plethora of ways to revise our own papers and our classmates papers. My first draft was not very strong, after revisiting my essay and listening to comments from peer-workshops I realized that I had a lot of work to do. I started with the content of my paper, I needed to make sure that my argument was strong and had good information to back it up. Next, I knew how to grammatically fix my paper for the most part, I really only had a lot of global revisions that I needed to make. Locally, making changes throughout my paper while revising was not very difficult. In local peer-revisions I knew to look out for the little things that are easy to miss such as spelling errors and grammatical errors. I also knew to look to make sure everything was cited and quoted correctly, for the most part. Globally, I was not elaborating on certain aspects of a lot of my first draft. Throughout the semester, while I was making claims I learned to ask myself things such as, “Why am I mentioning this in my argument?” or “What importance does this piece of text have to do with my argument?” Before this semester, I do not think I would have ever thought to ask myself that. Learning to ask myself this, I learned to ask others the same questions. If I felt that someone could go deeper into a certain aspect of their essay I would ask them what the significance of their sentence was and if they could expand on it. Then, once my first paper was peer-reviewed by my professor, I realized that I needed to fix the organization of my papers as well. I became aware that my argument needed to be distributed before the information that I was selecting from each of the texts. Therefore, I was able to fix that global aspect of my papers. The last global change that I learned to make was incorporating more quotes from the authors and along with introducing the quote and explaining what the important of the quote was. I believe this shows a lot towards my development of self-revision skills and of my peer-revision skills from the first draft of my first assigned paper to the final draft of my final assigned paper.