My ideas about what revising a paper meant have changed drastically throughout this semester. In high school, I would basically spit out a paper for the first draft, and then edit any minor grammatical errors I found and turn in my final draft. Obviously, my grade wouldn’t have survived if I continued that in this course so I actually learned how to revise. Now I know that revising isn’t just about changing a couple spelling errors or adding a couple commas, sometimes you have to rewrite the entire paragraph and continue to add evidence throughout. I have accepted that revising may require twice the time that it took to write the paper in the first place. I like to focus on making sure that I provided enough evidence to support my claim/thesis. If I feel that I don’t have enough support, I will now go back and look at my sources several times until I find extra information to add. I learned what the differences between global and local revision are and have focused on both in all of the papers, we’ve written in this course. In my meal analysis essay, for example, I had a hard time deciding what side I wanted to take so I actually ended up going back and changing my thesis statement several times until I was able to find one that I could clearly support. Before, I would have never thought that revising would sometimes mean changing your paper around completely, but it is just a matter of making whatever changes needed to make your paper as solid as possible.
