Demonstrate the ability to approach writing as a recursive process that requires substantial revision of drafts for content, organization, and clarity (global revision), as well as editing and proofreading (local revision).
Thinking of writing as a recursive process is something that can not be stressed enough. Coming to college I was aware of the writing process and the many parts that play into it, but over the course of the semester, I have taken these skills and allowed them to grow. Along with expanding on the steps I already understood, I have learned new approaches which helped me take my ideas further than I could before. I am now able to look at the writing process as more than just a predetermined list of steps in order to produce good writing. The importance of repetition of these steps, not just taking things one time through and calling it good. This has allowed me to push the conversation in the direction I want to, and I have learned that it takes multiple times through drafting, revising editing, and proofreading. Because of this, I have been able to overcome the problems I faced in my writing before college, and even in my first drafts of essays this semester.
I have made the most improvement in thinking critically about a source of reading material, and taking these thoughts and putting them onto paper. This is something I have struggled with for a long time, but by getting better at annotating, asking questions, and writing multiple drafts with review from peers and friends, my analysis of concepts and explaining them using my writing is much more clear and concise. I have come to understand global revision by writing multiple drafts and with peer review.
Figure 1. This is the start of a paragraph from my first draft of my third essay. It is a jumble of incomplete thoughts that did not really fit in with the section of writing that I was trying to connect with.
Figure 2. Here is what the previous paragraph shown turned out to be in my final draft of my third essay. After receiving feedback from my peers and finishing up the rest of the paper, I was able to separate the concepts I was discussing in a way that made more sense. Once I was able to make these global revisions and move my ideas around, it was much easier to expand on the topic that I was trying to write about.
