First Draft: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JfqIqmOcoCdg11RoUEkvgw6dOkyprScDO58pgoccbkI/edit?usp=sharing
Second Draft: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fTY5MG0jRtwkzv1hTPk_LSazmnsZqoyB1KlYxpTsz_s/edit?usp=sharing
I chose my third essay as my Significant Writing Project because I felt that after writing three essays I was confident in my skills of editing and revising my writing. I began my revision process by taking my first draft of my essay, and looking through it to find the smaller mistakes and made local revisions. These type of revisions could include grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc. After my first round of revisions were made, I sent it to at least three of my peers and had them edit it. As Nancy Sommers says in her article “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers”, it is important to have someone rather than your self look at your writing, so that they can identify the “something larger” that could be fixed and significantly improve my essay. The first learning outcome talks about how writing should be a “recursive process” with “substantial revision of drafts.” With this in mind, I made sure that I took my time in the revision process, and made multiple versions of the same draft until I felt that it was where it needed to be. After my peers edited my paper, this is when I looked further in depth into my paper and took both my peers, and my own ideas to make global revisions. In the first draft of my third essay(Significant Writing Project), I didn’t quite have all of my ideas organized or thoughts written out how I wanted them to be. I also didn’t have a solid introduction or conclusion in my first draft so these were the things I knew I needed to focus on when revising my draft. A writer that was quoted in Sommers article said that, “I have learned from experience that I need to keep writing a first draft until I figure out what to say. Then in a second draft, I begin to see the structure of an argument…” I can strongly relate and agree to this because I also use my first draft as a way to just get out everything I want to say, and then make all those ideas make sense in the second draft. I believe this is a great example of approaching writing as a “recursive process”, and I have found that writing multiple drafts has led me to come out with a stronger final project. Once both the local and global revisions were made to my third essay, I read through the entire thing one more time to make sure everything made sense and flowed together. Once I felt like it was ready, my revision process was over and my essay was ready to be turned in.
