I have always had a pretty standard drafting process when it comes to my writing. I find that having an organized outline and multiple drafts work better for me. When I am doing a large writing assignment, I like to make an outline of the main points that I will be writing about. I was taught in high school English to add as many details and full sentences in my outlines as possible. This has proven very helpful when I am writing a first draft. I have a hard time planning out what I am going to write until I am actually writing it. I find that what I want to say comes more naturally to me as I am trying to write something. In high school, we never really peer-reviewed in class. We were given an assignment and it had to be done completely outside of class, which made the opportunity to peer review tricky. However, I have always sent important writing assignments to my sister and grandfather to read before I attempt to revise them. My sister is a teacher, and my grandfather is a law professor, so I found that they are able to give me feedback that is can use to edit and revise my work. I have always found it helpful for me to have other people look at my work before I try to revise it. After other people look my writing over, I go back through and revise what needs to be fixed. I always like to read my writing out loud to myself once I have revised it, to make sure that it sounds smooth. I also try to read it to another person in case there was something that I missed. Once all of these steps are completed, I am usually confident enough to submit what I have as a final draft.
I believe that my first experience really drafting, revising, and peer editing began in 8th grade. My 8th grade English teacher was one of those teachers you will remember for a long time, even if I wasn’t always the most engaged in the class. Peer reviewing Is a big step for writing because you are essentially putting your thoughts into your peers hands and minds. I now find the revising process much more smooth than the workshop, multi day revisions that we used when initially learning to write. I find that peer evaluation can vary heavily depending on how many times you practice peer revision for a certain paper, the more criticism the better. The revision process follows the initial draft, often I see my original drafts have very little similarities to my future and final drafts. I find that when I am having a hard time writing I write somewhat analytically, only to go back after my draft is finished and write from a creative perspective. My most effective revision process is reading my own writing out loud. Reading out loud is almost foolproof for inevitable errors like spelling, sentence structure, and wording. Reading and annotating my own paper often helps find issues with paragraph structure, how the paper is flowing and making sure that I’m not clashing paragraphs together that shouldn’t be. I often have to look back and rearrange the structure of my essays because the topics don’t fit very well together, most likely because when writing I tend to put everything down at once before being able to see how it fits. My revision process is normally longer than my writing process due to this, making sure I have my thoughts down as I want is also another big thing I look for when revising because sometimes I seem to write more to fit criteria than what I’m actually looking to get out of the assignment.
For me, drafting writing projects has always been my least favorite thing about the writing process. Even though revision is incredibly important for my writing, it feels redundant and boring. When I write an essay or paper, I generally create an outline of points I want to touch on and elaborate and then I just write a simple version of what I want and then I will go back and keep adding onto my points and building the essay up from there. Personally, I make better points throughout my essay and my writing process goes smoother when I jump around the essay to add points in other than only focusing on the introduction or one of the body paragraphs until they are finished. I didn’t do many peer reviews in high school or college so far but, my experience with peer review is having a partner read my paper while I read theirs and our teacher provides a grading rubric with different expectations so then we can rate how well our partner achieved that expectation. This was my favorite way I’ve done a peer review because it is sometimes difficult to judge someone else’s work but the rubric guides us to look for exactly what the person may be missing or what they executed well. Peer reviews are really helpful and useful when finalizing my essay as long as they are executed well. I can read through their ratings of my work and then I am able to fix my weak points throughout my writing project. Peer review with someone I am comfortable with is my preference because, if possible, I enjoy making my writing projects personal to my life. Writing projects that I can make personal are my favorite because it makes the prompt enjoyable to write and it makes the essay more meaningful to me.
Drafting for writing has always been hard for me. It’s hard now and it was hard when I was younger. When I get in the zone, I love to just write and the words keep coming. It just flows onto the page and it comes so naturally to me. In the past, I would just write and not plan anything out. Then I would go back and make small edits. But now, if I have a big essay, I like to write it on paper. I would write what I want in a sentence for the introduction, the body paragraphs I had planned and the conclusion. When I was younger, I would have written multiple drafts in elementary school. I would have had three different pages because my teacher liked to see my progress in my writing. We only wrote them down on paper while we were doing our drafts. When we were happy with our third draft, we would bowwow a school computer and type it up. In high school, I didn’t have a teacher making me do paper drafts so I was able to decide how to plan my essays myself. But when I was in high school, that’s when we started doing peer review. I never liked it because self confidence in my writing has always been a struggle for me. Reading my writing out loud in front of people or even just having someone else who is the same age as me makes me nervous. When I would turn any of my writing assignments into my teacher, I would always be proud of my work and be excited to share it. But not around my peers. That’s still how I feel today. But the more practice I get the better I get at it. Even if it’s not something I enjoy.
I am going to be honest, I almost never complete more than one draft when writing projects. I know it is a terrible work habit that should definitely be worked upon, but it is always how I have done things. When starting my writing career, I thought my first drafts were always sufficient enough to turn in, if not more than. I understand that this may sound arrogant, but I truly got grades satisfactory enough that I never had to second guess my methods. I will usually read the material over a time or two, change a few grammatical errors if needed, and sometimes revise full paragraphs if I feel that the writing looked rushed or inadequate. I will mentally piece together sentences until they meet my standards before typing them or putting them down on paper. My head may be a mess most of the time, but when it comes to writing, I like to think that it gives me an opportunity to organize my thoughts.
This method of writing worked for me until I began my College Composition class in high school. That class was much more advanced than the norm I was used to and I struggled to revise my methods. I had to relearn how I wrote and it made it much more complicated for me. In College Composition, we were to complete and turn in multiple drafts before submitting the final draft at the end. Even before submitting the final draft, we went through peer editing and conferences with the teacher himself. The peer editing was strenuous and took many classes before we were able to meet for a conference. Though it was difficult, I learned so much and used the new knowledge to my advantage.
Since then, I have slightly referred back to my old methods, but I have improved them. I make sure to make either a physical or mental outline of what I will write and do whatever research I need to do for the project. I thoughtfully plan each individual sentence before putting it down, then at the end I look everything over and make sure the final product meets my standards. It takes a while to put the first draft together, but once I do it does not need much revision before I feel I can turn it in.
When I’m drafting, the environment is key. I make sure my cat is in another room so he doesn’t come banging on my door demanding to be let in. I make sure I have socks on. I throw my phone across the room. I don’t need it to be completely silent, but music definitely takes away from my concentration. Also, it’s crucial for me to get into the zone. Once I get an idea, it leads to more, and then they don’t stop. I like to milk these circumstances as much as possible. Now personal revision doesn’t require me to be completely focused, because it doesn’t necessitate as much brain power as coming up with new ideas. I firstly focus on the glaring issues, like paragraph order. Then I move on to sentence order. Then I might add some more detail. Then I finally read word-for-word through my paper to catch any funny spellings or grammatical mistakes. Peer review on the other hand has historically been a challenge for me, but not in this class. In high school, I was terrified of people seeing my work, finished or not, because I knew I was a horrible writer. Opposingly, I liked and still like reading my classmates’ work. It’s like looking into their soul. In high school, English was my least favorite subject. Writing was a chore. I didn’t really have any method for writing. I knew that you were supposed to make an outline, fill it out to make a draft, then polish that up into the final version. I did not do that. My method was to write an entire paper in 2-3 big sessions. The more pressure and anxiety the better. I would carve each paragraph into its final form in one sitting. I would aim to write the entire essay in one go from top to bottom.
My experiences with drafting and revising have varied. Usually, writing is something I enjoy doing. I love to write, and I get angry sometimes when I can’t put my exact thoughts onto the page making it sound right. My biggest issue is starting my first draft. I tend to get a horrible case of writers block. I overthink as soon as I have to write an introduction. I think that introducing a topic is hard for me because I want to talk about so many different topics to do with the one im writing about. I feel like its hard to express my thoughts on the page, and it comes a lot easier to others. I do love writing though, when there is something I want to talk about I could go on for hours. When writing drafts, I tend to focus on perfecting small details, which is not what drafting is about. Now that we are writing drafts for this class and many others in college, I am trying to understand it better. Every draft gets better and better, due to revising. My experiences with revising have been very helpful. My mother used to revise all of my papers, and correct it so I could go back and fix it. I have been trying to use all my resources I can here at UNE. Going to the writing center I have practiced with a lot of revising. I figured out that when I read what I am writing down out loud, it helps me to understand what I need to fix. When it comes to revising in the classroom, sometimes i feel nervous. Reading other students papers is a great way to find different strategies you find useful though. In class when we revised our essays, many things that I never even noticed sounded wrong before were caught by my classmates. Being able to create drafts and knowing that your first piece doesnt have to be perfect is a relief.
Like many of us, over the years I have had to write, revise and edit many essays both my personal work and others of peers. This is a skill that did not come overnight as it took many different times to read and edit my own work before I had felt confident enough to edit and make suggestions to others. For me personally, my writing skills are very simple as I plan my introduction paragraphs. I tend to outline what I specifically plan on talking about by mentioning my different talking points and then adding them later into my thesis statement. This has helped me structure my writing and help others in their writing process as well. As mentioned before the revising process did not come easily as I had frequently found myself missing errors and paying for them later when receiving my grade, they were simple mistakes such as having a comma where a period would have belonged but I found that if I had slowed down my thinking and reading took the time to think if what was reading actually made sense had a large effect on my final grades when passing in my work. This helped me especially when looking at others’ work because I was able to provide an unbiased opinion. When drafting I believe one of the most important lessons I’ve had to learn over the years was that the writing is not going to be perfect the first time you or someone writes or types a thought onto a surface, that writing is going to take time and there are thousands of resources willing and itching to help you provide the best work possible for your audience. This strategy has helped me calm my anxiety over perfectionism especially when it comes to my academics and I hope I am able to share this and impact others.
Writing is not something that can occur in one general pass. It takes actual effort and care to create something meaningful and that you can be proud of. But it is far easier said than done. Thus, there’s a complex process to every successful piece of writing involving drafting and revision. Personally, drafting is always the most challenging part of the writing process. To first get the creative spark, I really have to think first until I ultimately put something down, decide that I don’t like it, change it, then have to go back to not quite square one I suppose, but painfully close to it. After the flow of writing starts, the words come spilling out in a way that is sometimes good, often fine, but more frequently than I’d like not really making sense. So starts the process of revision. Rarely do I clear everything out and start over with revisions, as I usually have some relatively good points and pieces. But much of it must get the ax and I’m forced to rethink. After much deliberation and some confusion, I have edits and changes that are ready to be applied to my work, and so I take off again, until I once again finish and have to reappraise my work, always finding something that could be tweaked or modified until I get something that I find pretty ironed out. My experience with peer review is that it’s sometimes quite productive and you come away with real, tangible edits that can be made, like this most recent peer review session entailed. But in my experience it’s more often than not a strange conversation where everyone delivers vague compliments and barely any criticism, if at all. I think it usually boils down to people not wanting to upset others, as well as not always feeling qualified enough to deliver edits that they do see. That being said, when everyone comes to it with the same sense of “Hey, I may not know everything about writing conventions, but I’ll still give my two cents” as well as making sure to not deliver it too harshly as to offend the other writers, it can be a rewarding and genuinely rewarding experience for all.
In high school working on our essay drafts in class was thorough. In the past I write my first draft at home and then revise it in class with the time we are given. Normally I have my parents or sister read it out loud to me after my first draft is complete. Then in class we did do peer review, and we just read one another’s and made changes as needed. I find it beneficial because it is another pair of eyes reading it and able to recognize mistakes I didn’t. Also, I tend to write how I talk, which is not very helpful when writing an essay, so I need other people to read it over. It takes me a while to get everything I want on the paper because I always restate things over and over. I normally completely rewrite it over and over when I figure out how I want it displayed and formed. I do about 4-5 drafts because I always rewrite it and reform it to how I really want it. It all comes together in the end, but I do think the revision process then was beneficial with the peer review and constantly drafting and working on each paragraph. Which we normally broke down each paragraph trying to rephrase words and find better adjectives to make it more appealing. The overall process was very helpful and beneficial to my essays and after all the drafts the revision was always easy with the help.
In my experiences drafting a paper I have experienced a lot of different things. I have had successes as well as having unsuccessful papers. I have drafted many papers throughout my whole school career. I have learned how to revise and peer review as well as many other helpful skills and tactics. I love writing and I think the draft is the most important part. I truly think the draft is the backbone of a writing project. Reading papers over and reviewing everything you have written is so very important. Last class when we did peer review about our food papers, my partner and I brought up a very good point. We said that when we were reading over our papers we kept changing things and adding more each time we read them. That is so vital to writing a good paper because then it adds so much personality to the paper itself. Peer review is something that I find extremely helpful. I have never done a peer review where we have to read our papers out loud before. I think that helped a lot because I noticed a lot of things that I had to fix and go over. My partners really helped me out throughout the peer review process because they gave me constructive feedback and criticism. The revision process is also a super helpful part of writing a paper. I like going back over my work and changing things to give it more structure and depth. When we did peer review my partners gave me notes about things I should change within my paper. I found this really helpful because I went through and changed so many things and now my paper sounds a lot better when I read it out loud. I have had good experiences with peer review and drafting papers as well as with doing revisions. The outcome of my paper is always so much better when I try hard and do peer review.
When it comes to drafting an essay I usually don’t think anything of it until words are typed or written out. I put my thoughts into words and just write away. Once all my thoughts are put into words, I re-read my paper about three or four times, just so I can find any mistakes. For example, accidentally writing the same thing over and over again, running on sentences, misspelled words, grammatical errors, etc. I tend to mess up in my writing a lot because I don’t think I put in enough effort like I should. Going on with the making of a draft, I start off with the topic, I put the most important information first, then I would take my evidence to back it up. By evidence I mean quotes, etc. The process to writing my 1000 word draft, was exactly what I said earlier; I thought about what my favorite meal was, I thought about how that meal is made, I thought about what my mother would think about this meal, I talked about how that meal made me feel, then I put all of my thoughts together and typed it out on my computer. What I have learned about writing a draft is that it is okay to make mistakes, it’s a draft, more so a rough draft. Hence the word “rough” it’s not going to be perfect. It gives you the opportunity to fix your mistakes, and also learn from your mistakes as well. Using the rough draft method while writing anything has improved my writing skills because you are teaching yourself to become a better writer everytime you catch one of your writing mistakes on paper. I do think that using a draft is also helpful because it allows you to give yourself more time to think about what you would like to say in any of your writings.
My middle school attempted to prepare us for writing essays by handing out a sheet with a template on it. The sheet would always have a bubble labeled “intro” and arrows pointing to other bubbles labeled “body”, or “details”, or “evidence”, and a final one titled “conclusion”. Basically, the draft process was putting in generic, bland thoughts into these bubbles to later then fill them in with more words and detail. This process ultimately lasted up through my freshman year of high school. I always hated having to do these templates because it didn’t really fit my writing style. Come sophomore year of high school essays become actual essays and thought needs to be produced in order to receive a good grade. At this point I had already been acknowledged by many teachers and other students that my essays were really good. That’s because I ditched the template method and just started typing them out the night before they were due. This was my new drafting process for my writing projects. I have never been able to write something up and come back to it later to “make it better”. Throughout the rest of high school I was able to continue to receive good grades on my essays. I would research and get any information needed on the topic at hand, take a bunch of notes, and just start writing. This process has yet to fail me. Once I finish typing up my essay my friend and I would exchange essays and review them for each other. Both of us knew that we could trust each other to give good un biased opinions in order to better improve our essays. When it came to peer review in the classroom I would hope to get paired up with someone who could actually provide good feedback, but that was not always the case. Regardless of who I was paired up with though, I would always check in with my teacher to get their opinions on my draft before turning it in. Once I have my feed back and it’s time for the final product, the most changes I have to make end up being grammar, or better word choice.
Peer editing has always been a love hate relationship for me. My peer editing career started when I was in middle school, I’ve slowly increased my skill throughout the years. Getting your paper peer edited is great, I feel as if it is a necessary step in bettering your writing and making it more presentable. Throughout high school I’ve improved dramatically in this academic skill. One thing I find intimidating about peer editing is if I mess up on someone else’s paper, trying to improve on it but adding something that doesn’t need to be added. I don’t mind getting my paper edited, I enjoy constructive criticism, but I am a little skeptical about my own ability when editing someone else’s paper.
14 thoughts on “JOURNAL # 4”
I have always had a pretty standard drafting process when it comes to my writing. I find that having an organized outline and multiple drafts work better for me. When I am doing a large writing assignment, I like to make an outline of the main points that I will be writing about. I was taught in high school English to add as many details and full sentences in my outlines as possible. This has proven very helpful when I am writing a first draft. I have a hard time planning out what I am going to write until I am actually writing it. I find that what I want to say comes more naturally to me as I am trying to write something. In high school, we never really peer-reviewed in class. We were given an assignment and it had to be done completely outside of class, which made the opportunity to peer review tricky. However, I have always sent important writing assignments to my sister and grandfather to read before I attempt to revise them. My sister is a teacher, and my grandfather is a law professor, so I found that they are able to give me feedback that is can use to edit and revise my work. I have always found it helpful for me to have other people look at my work before I try to revise it. After other people look my writing over, I go back through and revise what needs to be fixed. I always like to read my writing out loud to myself once I have revised it, to make sure that it sounds smooth. I also try to read it to another person in case there was something that I missed. Once all of these steps are completed, I am usually confident enough to submit what I have as a final draft.
I believe that my first experience really drafting, revising, and peer editing began in 8th grade. My 8th grade English teacher was one of those teachers you will remember for a long time, even if I wasn’t always the most engaged in the class. Peer reviewing Is a big step for writing because you are essentially putting your thoughts into your peers hands and minds. I now find the revising process much more smooth than the workshop, multi day revisions that we used when initially learning to write. I find that peer evaluation can vary heavily depending on how many times you practice peer revision for a certain paper, the more criticism the better. The revision process follows the initial draft, often I see my original drafts have very little similarities to my future and final drafts. I find that when I am having a hard time writing I write somewhat analytically, only to go back after my draft is finished and write from a creative perspective. My most effective revision process is reading my own writing out loud. Reading out loud is almost foolproof for inevitable errors like spelling, sentence structure, and wording. Reading and annotating my own paper often helps find issues with paragraph structure, how the paper is flowing and making sure that I’m not clashing paragraphs together that shouldn’t be. I often have to look back and rearrange the structure of my essays because the topics don’t fit very well together, most likely because when writing I tend to put everything down at once before being able to see how it fits. My revision process is normally longer than my writing process due to this, making sure I have my thoughts down as I want is also another big thing I look for when revising because sometimes I seem to write more to fit criteria than what I’m actually looking to get out of the assignment.
For me, drafting writing projects has always been my least favorite thing about the writing process. Even though revision is incredibly important for my writing, it feels redundant and boring. When I write an essay or paper, I generally create an outline of points I want to touch on and elaborate and then I just write a simple version of what I want and then I will go back and keep adding onto my points and building the essay up from there. Personally, I make better points throughout my essay and my writing process goes smoother when I jump around the essay to add points in other than only focusing on the introduction or one of the body paragraphs until they are finished. I didn’t do many peer reviews in high school or college so far but, my experience with peer review is having a partner read my paper while I read theirs and our teacher provides a grading rubric with different expectations so then we can rate how well our partner achieved that expectation. This was my favorite way I’ve done a peer review because it is sometimes difficult to judge someone else’s work but the rubric guides us to look for exactly what the person may be missing or what they executed well. Peer reviews are really helpful and useful when finalizing my essay as long as they are executed well. I can read through their ratings of my work and then I am able to fix my weak points throughout my writing project. Peer review with someone I am comfortable with is my preference because, if possible, I enjoy making my writing projects personal to my life. Writing projects that I can make personal are my favorite because it makes the prompt enjoyable to write and it makes the essay more meaningful to me.
Drafting for writing has always been hard for me. It’s hard now and it was hard when I was younger. When I get in the zone, I love to just write and the words keep coming. It just flows onto the page and it comes so naturally to me. In the past, I would just write and not plan anything out. Then I would go back and make small edits. But now, if I have a big essay, I like to write it on paper. I would write what I want in a sentence for the introduction, the body paragraphs I had planned and the conclusion. When I was younger, I would have written multiple drafts in elementary school. I would have had three different pages because my teacher liked to see my progress in my writing. We only wrote them down on paper while we were doing our drafts. When we were happy with our third draft, we would bowwow a school computer and type it up. In high school, I didn’t have a teacher making me do paper drafts so I was able to decide how to plan my essays myself. But when I was in high school, that’s when we started doing peer review. I never liked it because self confidence in my writing has always been a struggle for me. Reading my writing out loud in front of people or even just having someone else who is the same age as me makes me nervous. When I would turn any of my writing assignments into my teacher, I would always be proud of my work and be excited to share it. But not around my peers. That’s still how I feel today. But the more practice I get the better I get at it. Even if it’s not something I enjoy.
I am going to be honest, I almost never complete more than one draft when writing projects. I know it is a terrible work habit that should definitely be worked upon, but it is always how I have done things. When starting my writing career, I thought my first drafts were always sufficient enough to turn in, if not more than. I understand that this may sound arrogant, but I truly got grades satisfactory enough that I never had to second guess my methods. I will usually read the material over a time or two, change a few grammatical errors if needed, and sometimes revise full paragraphs if I feel that the writing looked rushed or inadequate. I will mentally piece together sentences until they meet my standards before typing them or putting them down on paper. My head may be a mess most of the time, but when it comes to writing, I like to think that it gives me an opportunity to organize my thoughts.
This method of writing worked for me until I began my College Composition class in high school. That class was much more advanced than the norm I was used to and I struggled to revise my methods. I had to relearn how I wrote and it made it much more complicated for me. In College Composition, we were to complete and turn in multiple drafts before submitting the final draft at the end. Even before submitting the final draft, we went through peer editing and conferences with the teacher himself. The peer editing was strenuous and took many classes before we were able to meet for a conference. Though it was difficult, I learned so much and used the new knowledge to my advantage.
Since then, I have slightly referred back to my old methods, but I have improved them. I make sure to make either a physical or mental outline of what I will write and do whatever research I need to do for the project. I thoughtfully plan each individual sentence before putting it down, then at the end I look everything over and make sure the final product meets my standards. It takes a while to put the first draft together, but once I do it does not need much revision before I feel I can turn it in.
When I’m drafting, the environment is key. I make sure my cat is in another room so he doesn’t come banging on my door demanding to be let in. I make sure I have socks on. I throw my phone across the room. I don’t need it to be completely silent, but music definitely takes away from my concentration. Also, it’s crucial for me to get into the zone. Once I get an idea, it leads to more, and then they don’t stop. I like to milk these circumstances as much as possible. Now personal revision doesn’t require me to be completely focused, because it doesn’t necessitate as much brain power as coming up with new ideas. I firstly focus on the glaring issues, like paragraph order. Then I move on to sentence order. Then I might add some more detail. Then I finally read word-for-word through my paper to catch any funny spellings or grammatical mistakes. Peer review on the other hand has historically been a challenge for me, but not in this class. In high school, I was terrified of people seeing my work, finished or not, because I knew I was a horrible writer. Opposingly, I liked and still like reading my classmates’ work. It’s like looking into their soul. In high school, English was my least favorite subject. Writing was a chore. I didn’t really have any method for writing. I knew that you were supposed to make an outline, fill it out to make a draft, then polish that up into the final version. I did not do that. My method was to write an entire paper in 2-3 big sessions. The more pressure and anxiety the better. I would carve each paragraph into its final form in one sitting. I would aim to write the entire essay in one go from top to bottom.
My experiences with drafting and revising have varied. Usually, writing is something I enjoy doing. I love to write, and I get angry sometimes when I can’t put my exact thoughts onto the page making it sound right. My biggest issue is starting my first draft. I tend to get a horrible case of writers block. I overthink as soon as I have to write an introduction. I think that introducing a topic is hard for me because I want to talk about so many different topics to do with the one im writing about. I feel like its hard to express my thoughts on the page, and it comes a lot easier to others. I do love writing though, when there is something I want to talk about I could go on for hours. When writing drafts, I tend to focus on perfecting small details, which is not what drafting is about. Now that we are writing drafts for this class and many others in college, I am trying to understand it better. Every draft gets better and better, due to revising. My experiences with revising have been very helpful. My mother used to revise all of my papers, and correct it so I could go back and fix it. I have been trying to use all my resources I can here at UNE. Going to the writing center I have practiced with a lot of revising. I figured out that when I read what I am writing down out loud, it helps me to understand what I need to fix. When it comes to revising in the classroom, sometimes i feel nervous. Reading other students papers is a great way to find different strategies you find useful though. In class when we revised our essays, many things that I never even noticed sounded wrong before were caught by my classmates. Being able to create drafts and knowing that your first piece doesnt have to be perfect is a relief.
Like many of us, over the years I have had to write, revise and edit many essays both my personal work and others of peers. This is a skill that did not come overnight as it took many different times to read and edit my own work before I had felt confident enough to edit and make suggestions to others. For me personally, my writing skills are very simple as I plan my introduction paragraphs. I tend to outline what I specifically plan on talking about by mentioning my different talking points and then adding them later into my thesis statement. This has helped me structure my writing and help others in their writing process as well. As mentioned before the revising process did not come easily as I had frequently found myself missing errors and paying for them later when receiving my grade, they were simple mistakes such as having a comma where a period would have belonged but I found that if I had slowed down my thinking and reading took the time to think if what was reading actually made sense had a large effect on my final grades when passing in my work. This helped me especially when looking at others’ work because I was able to provide an unbiased opinion. When drafting I believe one of the most important lessons I’ve had to learn over the years was that the writing is not going to be perfect the first time you or someone writes or types a thought onto a surface, that writing is going to take time and there are thousands of resources willing and itching to help you provide the best work possible for your audience. This strategy has helped me calm my anxiety over perfectionism especially when it comes to my academics and I hope I am able to share this and impact others.
Writing is not something that can occur in one general pass. It takes actual effort and care to create something meaningful and that you can be proud of. But it is far easier said than done. Thus, there’s a complex process to every successful piece of writing involving drafting and revision. Personally, drafting is always the most challenging part of the writing process. To first get the creative spark, I really have to think first until I ultimately put something down, decide that I don’t like it, change it, then have to go back to not quite square one I suppose, but painfully close to it. After the flow of writing starts, the words come spilling out in a way that is sometimes good, often fine, but more frequently than I’d like not really making sense. So starts the process of revision. Rarely do I clear everything out and start over with revisions, as I usually have some relatively good points and pieces. But much of it must get the ax and I’m forced to rethink. After much deliberation and some confusion, I have edits and changes that are ready to be applied to my work, and so I take off again, until I once again finish and have to reappraise my work, always finding something that could be tweaked or modified until I get something that I find pretty ironed out. My experience with peer review is that it’s sometimes quite productive and you come away with real, tangible edits that can be made, like this most recent peer review session entailed. But in my experience it’s more often than not a strange conversation where everyone delivers vague compliments and barely any criticism, if at all. I think it usually boils down to people not wanting to upset others, as well as not always feeling qualified enough to deliver edits that they do see. That being said, when everyone comes to it with the same sense of “Hey, I may not know everything about writing conventions, but I’ll still give my two cents” as well as making sure to not deliver it too harshly as to offend the other writers, it can be a rewarding and genuinely rewarding experience for all.
In high school working on our essay drafts in class was thorough. In the past I write my first draft at home and then revise it in class with the time we are given. Normally I have my parents or sister read it out loud to me after my first draft is complete. Then in class we did do peer review, and we just read one another’s and made changes as needed. I find it beneficial because it is another pair of eyes reading it and able to recognize mistakes I didn’t. Also, I tend to write how I talk, which is not very helpful when writing an essay, so I need other people to read it over. It takes me a while to get everything I want on the paper because I always restate things over and over. I normally completely rewrite it over and over when I figure out how I want it displayed and formed. I do about 4-5 drafts because I always rewrite it and reform it to how I really want it. It all comes together in the end, but I do think the revision process then was beneficial with the peer review and constantly drafting and working on each paragraph. Which we normally broke down each paragraph trying to rephrase words and find better adjectives to make it more appealing. The overall process was very helpful and beneficial to my essays and after all the drafts the revision was always easy with the help.
In my experiences drafting a paper I have experienced a lot of different things. I have had successes as well as having unsuccessful papers. I have drafted many papers throughout my whole school career. I have learned how to revise and peer review as well as many other helpful skills and tactics. I love writing and I think the draft is the most important part. I truly think the draft is the backbone of a writing project. Reading papers over and reviewing everything you have written is so very important. Last class when we did peer review about our food papers, my partner and I brought up a very good point. We said that when we were reading over our papers we kept changing things and adding more each time we read them. That is so vital to writing a good paper because then it adds so much personality to the paper itself. Peer review is something that I find extremely helpful. I have never done a peer review where we have to read our papers out loud before. I think that helped a lot because I noticed a lot of things that I had to fix and go over. My partners really helped me out throughout the peer review process because they gave me constructive feedback and criticism. The revision process is also a super helpful part of writing a paper. I like going back over my work and changing things to give it more structure and depth. When we did peer review my partners gave me notes about things I should change within my paper. I found this really helpful because I went through and changed so many things and now my paper sounds a lot better when I read it out loud. I have had good experiences with peer review and drafting papers as well as with doing revisions. The outcome of my paper is always so much better when I try hard and do peer review.
When it comes to drafting an essay I usually don’t think anything of it until words are typed or written out. I put my thoughts into words and just write away. Once all my thoughts are put into words, I re-read my paper about three or four times, just so I can find any mistakes. For example, accidentally writing the same thing over and over again, running on sentences, misspelled words, grammatical errors, etc. I tend to mess up in my writing a lot because I don’t think I put in enough effort like I should. Going on with the making of a draft, I start off with the topic, I put the most important information first, then I would take my evidence to back it up. By evidence I mean quotes, etc. The process to writing my 1000 word draft, was exactly what I said earlier; I thought about what my favorite meal was, I thought about how that meal is made, I thought about what my mother would think about this meal, I talked about how that meal made me feel, then I put all of my thoughts together and typed it out on my computer. What I have learned about writing a draft is that it is okay to make mistakes, it’s a draft, more so a rough draft. Hence the word “rough” it’s not going to be perfect. It gives you the opportunity to fix your mistakes, and also learn from your mistakes as well. Using the rough draft method while writing anything has improved my writing skills because you are teaching yourself to become a better writer everytime you catch one of your writing mistakes on paper. I do think that using a draft is also helpful because it allows you to give yourself more time to think about what you would like to say in any of your writings.
My middle school attempted to prepare us for writing essays by handing out a sheet with a template on it. The sheet would always have a bubble labeled “intro” and arrows pointing to other bubbles labeled “body”, or “details”, or “evidence”, and a final one titled “conclusion”. Basically, the draft process was putting in generic, bland thoughts into these bubbles to later then fill them in with more words and detail. This process ultimately lasted up through my freshman year of high school. I always hated having to do these templates because it didn’t really fit my writing style. Come sophomore year of high school essays become actual essays and thought needs to be produced in order to receive a good grade. At this point I had already been acknowledged by many teachers and other students that my essays were really good. That’s because I ditched the template method and just started typing them out the night before they were due. This was my new drafting process for my writing projects. I have never been able to write something up and come back to it later to “make it better”. Throughout the rest of high school I was able to continue to receive good grades on my essays. I would research and get any information needed on the topic at hand, take a bunch of notes, and just start writing. This process has yet to fail me. Once I finish typing up my essay my friend and I would exchange essays and review them for each other. Both of us knew that we could trust each other to give good un biased opinions in order to better improve our essays. When it came to peer review in the classroom I would hope to get paired up with someone who could actually provide good feedback, but that was not always the case. Regardless of who I was paired up with though, I would always check in with my teacher to get their opinions on my draft before turning it in. Once I have my feed back and it’s time for the final product, the most changes I have to make end up being grammar, or better word choice.
Peer editing has always been a love hate relationship for me. My peer editing career started when I was in middle school, I’ve slowly increased my skill throughout the years. Getting your paper peer edited is great, I feel as if it is a necessary step in bettering your writing and making it more presentable. Throughout high school I’ve improved dramatically in this academic skill. One thing I find intimidating about peer editing is if I mess up on someone else’s paper, trying to improve on it but adding something that doesn’t need to be added. I don’t mind getting my paper edited, I enjoy constructive criticism, but I am a little skeptical about my own ability when editing someone else’s paper.