Initially, when the revision process began for the first paper, I didn’t really understand how to revise a paper with a purpose. In high school, revision was just another opportunity to read over your paper and make some final tweaks. After learning about revising more in depth, and learning the differences between local and global revision, I felt I had a much stronger grasp on the overall concept. When looking at my initial draft, a majority of my local revisions were based around sentence structure and comma usage. I had begun to realize that I had a tendency to write very long sentences strung together by commas. Correcting this helped me to make my paper fluent enough so that anyone could read it smoothly all the way through. I realized that editing for grammar or sentence structure mistakes is easiest if you try and read the paper through someone else’s eyes, so that you are not just skimming through. When it came to global revision, A majority of my edits came from transitions into quotes, and ensuring that my concluding message was a more general insight. When looking at my quotes, I realized that it kind of seemed like they were randomly popping up. In my first draft there was little to no content leading the reader into the quote. Adding this not only helped my fluency more, but also the readers’ understanding throughout the paper, as they didn’t have to guess what I may be discussing next, or what the significance of a certain quote was. In my final conclusion, I had received comments to try and tie my main ideas from throughout the paper into a more general overarching message. In doing this, it helped me to be able to bring my thesis back around, and really give the reader a complete ending from where I had started. Being able to give a more general message at the end helps to avoid leaving the reader wondering or guessing at how you may feel now about the topic.
