November 7, 2019
For this assignment, I decided to read chapter eleven, or “Using the Templates to Revise”. Yes, the whole point of revision is really to focus on something specific but considering I don’t have a complete essay to reread and edit, I thought it would be best to read a chapter based on the revision process as a whole- just to get an idea on what are some good strategies or questions to be asking when revising my paper.
In this chapter, Graff and Birkenstein list several questions that you can answer while revising your paper. These questions are about representing what others say, what your own opinion is, the potential naysayer, the use of meta commentary (what is this???), tying your argument together with each claim, and why your argument matters. At the end of all these questions, they were nice enough to included an example of a revised essay with their explanations of how the student revised the paper.
Through this chapter, I didn’t really learn anything new to apply to my paper. The whole point may have been to learn something, but I found that this chapter more so clarified the knowledge I already had. The questions that the authors ask as you are revising your paper really make you stop to think. They are almost like your mom saying “make sure you bring this and that”, even if you were going to being them regardless. Because I don’t have a full paper to edit at this moment in time, I found this chapter most useful because I could ask myself these questions as I looked at the work I already had, to make sure it fit with my new writing better than before.
In a way, I suppose, it’s a good thing that you felt as if you had little more to learn. If anything, I suppose this chapter organizes the book into a quick reference for revision purposes. I like your forward-thinking strategy, however!