Outcome 1 (Recursive Process) – Demonstrate the ability to approach writing as a recursive process that requires substantial revision of drafts for content, organization, and clarity (global revision), as well as editing and proofreading (local revision). (420 Words)

Prior to this class, I was not the best at revising my work. Usually, I would write something and that first iteration was the final one, with little to no changes coming upon a second read through. Most of my issues for revision are rooted in my lack of practice in the process, something which I think I gained a lot of improvement on over the semester. 

Improvements on my global revision process rested mostly on ideological organization. As I wrote and after I completed drafting a paper, I would go back through and make sure that the ideas I brought up flowed together in a way that logically connected, something which I hadn’t bothered to do in other English classes before. It was important to me to improve this as connection within my pieces of the past was weak to say the least. Starting and ending paragraphs with my ideas is something I missed a lot early in my writing, which made it hard to tell where I stood on some issues. Below is a sample of how I changed the orders of my paragraphs from the beginning of my drafting to the final submission of my Essay #3.

Making big changes to organization made my final piece stronger and showed me the value of making these global revisions.

For local revision, the biggest thing I worked on was putting my ideas first and making sure that my sentences were in active voice. My eye for active vs. passive voice began when Professor Brod mentioned in my end comment on essay 1 that I had a noticeably high number of passive sentences. This stuck with me, and I took it as a priority issue to address.

Here are some statistics from essay 1 vs. essay 3 as provided by Microsoft word; We can see based on this that my active writing skills have improved substantially over the course of the semester. 

Note how Essay 1’s readability statistics show a higher percentage of passive sentences compared to Essay 3 by just over 10%. I think seeing such a big change in passive sentence inclusion shows just how much local revision helped me to improve the strength of my writing. Below is an example of where I had a passive sentence and revised it in the final draft to be active.

Acknowledging that my sentences could be stronger if I just reformatted them was huge for me, and I believe this change made my final essay the strongest I have written.