Outcome 4 refers to the ability to produce an article that is strong enough for presentation by proofreading and revising it. I have already come a long way for revising essays and improving writing skills. Because some examples related to revision are already used for showing how I make effort to conform outcomes 1~3 in previous writing, I will use some more typical evidences and focus on the process of revisions to show my ability to revise articles.

I have a good skill of revising articles according to the feedback given by the teacher. I hadn’t made any complex claim in the class before writing Major Paper 1; instead, we wrote analyses. Probably because of the thinking inertia, I wrote the first draft of MP1 as an analysis. I knew that I should had written an essay arguing about something with a complex claim, and I did show my awareness in the title of the paper – “Language Addition instead of Language Replacement” (MP1-D1, 1). However, when I was writing it, I just uncontrollably wrote it as a paper analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of language addition and language replacement, which is not a claim arguing about anything. As feedback, our teacher wrote this comment for my paper: “However, ‘analyzing the positive and negative effects’ of something is not an argument- rather, it is descriptive and analytical. Can you make an explicit claim that comes down on one side or the other” (MP1-D1 w/ Feedback, 1)? Tesla points out that I should have a claim that supports either language replacement or language addition instead of being “neutral”. Thus, in order to get rid of being “neutral”, I changed my claim to support language addition and rewrote my paper in a typical form of argument essay. Claim is almost the core of writing, because it represents for all other words the author is going to say in his/her paper. Thus, because I changed my unclear claim to a complex and reasonable claim, the quality of my paper rose from inadequate to outstanding. “I’m impressed” (MP1-D2 w/ Feedback, 9), Tesla commented.

I am also good at finding problems in my former writings by myself. In the second draft of major paper 1, I use an example of finger kowtow to demonstrate how language replacement destroys the cultural background of those who move to a new community, but I gave little introduction and subtle analysis for finger kowtow. Tesla or students in my peer review group hadn’t point out this problem, but I realized it when we were learning how to unpack and analyze evidences at class. In the second draft of MP1, I just write down the word of finger kowtow and the meaning of it inside the parenthesis to introduce it, “kowtow (a gesture Cantonese use to appreciate others’ pouring tea)” (4). And the only analysis for the relationship between how language replacement influences culture is “If Cantonese can only use Mandarin, they will forget the origin and meaning of finger kowtow” (4). My argumentation is not enough because our readers – those who speak English, may not know any background knowledge and meaning of kowtow. Therefore, I use more words to introduce finger kowtow in the big-four revision of this paper: “When Cantonese people have tea-drinking party, they perform a finger gesture to appreciate others’ pouring tea for them called ‘kowsow (tapping two fingers on the table).’ The word ‘kowsow’ sounds like ‘kowtow’ (an ultimate ceremony in East Asian cultures that appreciate someone by knocking head on the ground) in Cantonese, so Cantonese people chose to perform kowsow to appreciate their friends with their grateful hearts” (4), and I also spend more time analyzing how this evidence demonstrates the harm of language replacement: “If Cantonese people replace their language by others like English, the existence of kowsow gesture will no longer be reasonable, […] Language replacement does replace the language in a certain discourse community, but the girders based on the language and supporting the culture are left unconnected, which will finally lead to the collapse of the culture based on the replaced language.” (4) After being carefully revised, my argumentations based on the evidence of finger kowtow is much more persuasive.

In addition, an article that is strong enough for presentation should also have few grammatical errors or lower order concerns. I personally believe that I won’t always make severe grammar errors in my papers, even before I take English 131. However, I did sometimes write some sentences that are grammatically correct but sounds unnatural. For example, when talking about Amy Tan’s empathy, I wrote: “She hid her emotions almost everywhere under her words, waiting for us to unseal” (SA1-Original, 1). Later, Tesla pointed out that I should only use present tense when talking about texts, and I changed “hid” to “hides”. In another example, I wrote a sentence in passive voice while it might sound more powerful if it is written in active voice: “Those who replace not only their language but also their cultures would be laughed at by their counterparts in their original discourse community” (MP1 D2, 4). In the big-four edition, this sentence is replaced by other sentences that have different meanings. But if it is revised, it should become: “People in the original discourse community would laugh at their counterparts who replace not only their language but also their cultures.” All in all, once a lower order concern is pointed out or found, I will revise them and also learn how to avoid them.