There is no such thing as a perfect piece of writing. Every writing always has a room for improvement. Effective revision can make your writing one step closer to perfection. Revision is the stage in the writing process where you re-visit your writing and reviews, alters, and make careful changes to better your draft. It is different from the proofreading stage in the writing process where you just fix the commas and spelling. I’m not saying having the right grammar is not important, but revision is the stage where I reconsider my claim, analysis and some of the writing styles I employed.  

The assignment that I spent the most time revising was Short paper 1.3. The two biggest problems that my rough draft had was my wrong understanding of the scholarly article that I used for my essay and the lack of my own analysis of the article. Also, with my peer’s help, I was able to fix grammar errors that I had made.  

For this assignment I used the scholarly essay ““Trust Me”: Reading the Romance Plot in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale” by Madonne Miner. I borrowed some main pointsthat Miner made in her essay to make a claim that Offred is forced to possess a helpless characteristic by the male characters who have more power than Offred in the Gilead power hierarchy. In my previous claim, I misunderstood Miner’s purpose and wrote that it is Miner’claim that Offred is forced to become helpless by the male characters. However, this is not what Miner was getting at in her essay. In fact, this was my own claim and interpretation of the novel and the essay. I was just borrowing some useful ideas that Miner brought up in her essays to back up my claim and suggest an opposite perspective of what Allen Weiss said about Offred in his essay, “Offred’s Complicity and the Dystopian Tradition in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale”. It is shameful but I made a careless mistake about Weiss’s argument as well. In the rough draft, I wrote, “Weiss argues that Offred should be blamed for the creation of a Gilead rather than being seen as a victim of the regime” (Lee 1) when he was trying to say is that it’s her complicity that puts her at fault. So, as you (I meant YOU, Talyor!) suggested, I changed it to “Weiss argues that, rather than considering Offred as a victim of the regime, these reasons prove Offred’s complicity of the creation of Gilead” (Lee 1). These changes I made for the introduction were very essential. Not only do they make my claim more explicit, by providing correct interpretations of the scholarly essay that I used, they provide my readers with a clear guide and a road map of my paper.  

Another big problem that I had in my rough draft was the lack of my own analysis of the novel and the essays. Before I made the revisions, my paper was just a simple summary of the scholarly essays. So, in the revision process, I tried to add my own interpretations and explain how they were used to support my claim. For example, at the end of the first body paragraph, I added a sentence to explain how the tendency of the men hanging on to their old values left Offred no choice other than being vulnerable and accepting her disastrous fate.  

Also, I made small changes to connect the ideas back to my main claim. For instance, at the end of the last body paragraph, by just adding the phrase, “Because she has been accustomed with the chauvinistic ideas” (Lee 3), I was able to make a connection between the idea presented in the paragraph and my main claim. The phrase shows why Offred decides to pretend to agree with Luke when she honestly does not think Serena Joy is funny; she does this because Luke has implanted sexist thoughts in her. And this is what I tried to argue through this paper.   

In my rough draft, my conclusion paragraph only talked about why it is important to recognize who makes Offred become indifferent. And both my peer reviewer (Tay) and you told me that it felt somewhat abrupt. Therefore, along with the stakes, I decided to add a few more sentences to review important ideas that I presented in my paper in order to give the readers a wrap-up.  

Because I made a lot of grammar mistakes for the first assignment, I felt the least confident about grammar mechanics when writing. However, for this paper, Tay made a lot of helpful grammar corrections. One of them was that she gave me ideas to improve some of the word choices to make my writing sounds more professional. For example, instead of using a phrase “for sure”, she recommended using the word “definitely”. She also deleted words and phrases that made my writing cumbersome. Having a grammar errors fixed made my paper stronger because it gave a credibility to my writing skills. 

Although the papers that I am submitting now are the final versions of my writing, I am not saying that they are the most perfect version. I am sure that there are still a lot of ways for me to improve my papers. However, with the help of my fellow student and my instructor, I was able to add effective revisions to take the quality of my writing to one level higher.