Revising Revision

Projects 1 and 2 required Self Review and Peer Review as part of your revision process, but most written assignments will not include these steps. Most aspects of planning and editing will be your responsibility, and you will be expected to complete them independently. The product you produce will generally reveal whether or not you elected to take on those tasks, but as or more importantly, adding elements like outlining and self review to your personal process will impact your experience.

Being late and stressed is miserable. In addition to being nerve wracking, cramming simply isn’t effective. When your friends pretend they earn straight As without trying, they are pretending. Usually when we do this (and we all try to downplay our efforts at some point), it is because we are afraid that our best efforts won’t be good, let alone good enough for an A.

What we know now is that the effort really does matter and experience is valuable. If you made an ugly ashtray or a handprint-in-paint turkey in Art Class, the takeaway from being creative was internal and resulted from the process of being creative, not from the product of your creativity. The effort you put in when it comes to writing matters, too. You will learn and develop, but you will also write a better paper and better papers lead to more better papers and better writing in all areas. No one producing quality work does so without effort and planning and revision. No. One.

For Project 3, we will allow you to start to take the wheel and move revision into your own hands. In one-paragraph, discuss what you plan to do to revise your Textual Evaluation. The goal isn’t to say what you think your Instructor wants to hear but to be honest with yourself and try to find a personal approach that works for you.

Perhaps you want someone to review your paper, but you don’t know who to ask? Recognizing that opportunity and the steps necessary to capitalize on it is very valuable! Perhaps you will develop your own approach to self review. Or practice peer review informally with your friends. Or maybe will you pull out your checklist and reverse engineer it as you write so that you limit the required corrections. All great options.

Take this chance to think about what you want to do so that you have the time to make it happen. And while we have introduced some of the steps we have found valuable for students, know that your process truly is yours and that you will have to find and create the steps that help you most.