Ok, you’re probably officially sick of everybody grumbling about outcome four and the revising process, but I will admit that I am also not the biggest fan. During high school revision experiences, I would bet good money that most peer revisers spent all of about five minutes looking at my paper. Needless to say, these experiences didn’t prove to be very helpful to actually improving my papers. However, in this class I have discovered that when done right, revisions can make huge differences in papers and are crucial to the writing process. This process is done right by being sure to hit all the important aspects of this outcome, which involves the more nitpicky things like making sure everything is spelled right and doesn’t interfere with the understanding of the paper. More importantly, though, are the parts of this outcome that deal with being able to take advice from peers and instructors and be able to respond effectively to this criticism to make adjustments to the work for the better. Not only is it crucial to be able to revise your paper based on what others tell you to fix, but a writer must also be able to see for themselves changes that should be made and make these changes accordingly.

            The miracle of what revision can do to a paper is drastically apparent in my first major paper titled, “Popular Culture’s Effect on Personal Identification”. My first draft focused way too heavily on my secondary sources as pointed out by my peer reviewers.  In my first draft, the overuse of my secondary sources is apparent right away in my complex claim because my claim emphasizes a lot of what the sources were arguing. I changed my claim to resonate more of my argument, which can be seen when I state, “While popular culture is not the only factor determining someone’s personal identity, an examination of popular culture’s potential to inspire people in their educational and career pursuits and the unique experience that each work of popular culture has on a person will effectively show that popular culture does play an influential part in defining a person” (1).  Instead of stating the argument of the sources, I formulated my own unique argument. I also refocused my paper by expelling large portions of my text where I was talking primarily about the secondary source and replacing these portions with my own analysis. I also created this shift of focus from the other sources to my own argument by redoing the intro sentences to my paragraphs. I redid these intro sentences by emphasizing in them what I was going to say in that paragraph rather than what the secondary source was saying. There were also some spelling errors and sentence restructurings that I did to clean up my writing. When I revised this paper again as a showcase piece for this outcome, I really looked at the instructor’s comments on the paper, and I devoted a large portion of my time dealing with those issues. One thing that was brought up was that my conclusion paragraph fell a little flat, so I added to my conclusion paragraph some more elaboration on how self identity formation functions.

By the end of my revision process on this paper, although it still wasn’t perfect, it had greatly improved in all areas ranging from the organization to the strength of my argument. My ability to respond to criticism to improve my paper as well as my ability to find errors and make changes on my own demonstrates how much I improved in this outcome.