My abilities to treat writing like a recursive process were definitely strengthened by this course. Based on my second journal assignment, where we responded about our current writing process coming out of high school, I think I came into this semester with a decent foundation with the recursive writing process. Despite describing my revision process by fixing “any conceptual ideas that don’t make sense… look[ing] out for any choppy parts where one sentence does not flow to the next” I remember that my first draft was not changed much for the final draft.
However, now at the end of the semester I do feel more confident in my writing and that I now do a better job at treating writing like a recursive process, evident by the greater changes in my drafts. The changes in my drafts include both sentence level local revisions and larger conceptual global revisions.
As you can see from a sentence of my first draft compared to the sentence in my final draft, I made local revisions.
First draft: “Within this world and their own respective environments, animals must interact with each other in order to survive. Whether an animal kills and eats another for food, or whether both animals benefit from a mutualistic relationship”
Final draft: “Within this world and their own respective environments, animals must interact with each other in order to survive. These interactions could include an animal killing another for food, or both animals benefitting from a mutualistic relationship.”
The differences in sentence level structure between these drafts show how I made a revision to make the sentences flow better specifically at this point in my essay as well as throughout my writing. I also made further local revisions by continuing to fix sentence structure, such as this example, as well as any spelling or grammatical errors.
I also made global changes between my drafts. In my first draft you can see I believed to be using a source from Andersen, however in my final draft I no longer use a source from Andersen and instead used a source from Doughty. This is evident of a revision regarding the content as throughout the writing process, I found a better source that fit with my ideas.
Another global revision I made regards my thesis statement. As you can see from my first to the final draft, I added the following phrase to my thesis statement; “which is why I believe we humans may have difficulty addressing these concerns.” This addition to my thesis further clarifies my claim and ties my ideas together not only my body paragraphs together but as well as my concluding paragraph.
