My revision process

        Because this style of casual, train-of-thought writing is right up my alley, I was pretty satisfied with my piece right off the bat. Part of the reason for that, though, is because I am critical of my writing as it flows out my fingers. I type and read and erase and rewrite constantly, and that’s what works for me. For example, when I wrote the conclusion to the piece, I ended with “Writing gives me an emotion so intense that I can’t help but show, and that is a power unlike any other.” However, immediately afterwards, I reread it and decided to change it to present a more obvious, powerful statement. I quickly revised it to “Writing provides yet another emotion for me to feel intensely, but this time, I show it.” I’m not sure that I would have switched it if I hadn’t done it right then. I find that when I restrict myself from doing this immediate revising, I get stuck more often and it actually takes longer for me to complete a piece. Consequently, this makes it harder to make significant revisions after the fact. My peer revisors in class were helpful in answering the questions that I had about my work, but the nature of their responses did not call for much noteworthy change. I made small adjustments based on their suggestions. For instance, I made my potential childhood behavior in an imaginary scenario more tentative to make it less insensitive. I also took Jana’s suggestion to add in a sentence about the act of writing itself before my concluding paragraph in order to connect my stories to to their purpose. When I read it over again, I decided to go one step further and include some real-life examples of how my own writing has affected me emotionally to make my universal moral more specific and personal to myself. I found a few words here and there that I wrote in to give the paper more power, and I found a few others I could remove so as to pitch unnecessary details. Besides that, though, I struggled a bit with not finding much to add or subtract from the piece as I pored over the paper and analyzed the importance of each word, phrase, and sentence. But that, in itself, I realized, is revision. I have decided that each part of the paper is relevant and important, thereby revising it to my satisfaction. The biggest reason I am proud of this paper is because I successfully went into it with no idea what I was writing about. Since last semester, I have been practicing not knowing. It takes a lot of restraint to stop myself from planning a moral or lesson, but instead starting the piece and working through my thoughts as I write. With this paper, I started with the simplest, most obvious answer to the prompt that came to mind, and from there I considered my background, my personality, and my emotions to come to a significant realization. I can’t wait to write more!