In the process of writing my chosen Significant Writing Project, I made some big and little changes throughout the writing and editing stages. If you look at my first draft of this paper, I had a lot of “clunky” sentences with awkward wording. Some of that didn’t change when I turned in my final draft, but I understood what made them awkward and confusing to read. Another issue I had in the first draft that I corrected for the final draft was my introduction and explanation of quotes. Throughout this paper, I used many quotes from various authors, which is a good thing. The downfall is that they are not properly weaved into my writing.
In my first paragraph about Michael Erard’s essay, one of my peers left a comment about how the integration of the quote is choppy, which goes along with not properly weaving quotes and using awkward sentences, “Erard says ‘quote’ (Michael Erard)”. Looking back at this sentence, I cringe just thinking about what the rest of this draft looks like. In my final draft, I added “that” in front of the quote which, didn’t do too much, but it sounds slightly better. I also only cited his last name instead of his full name, which is correct MLA formatting. In the same paragraph as the one I just discussed, I have an awkward sentence that makes me want to scream by looking at it. “For example, “life is a rollercoaster” can accurately describe how life is.” This sentence hurts me on a deep level. First of all, it sounds terrible. Second of all, why did I think it would be a good idea, it doesn’t add on to the point of the paragraph.
Another big problem I had with the first draft is that it’s not a complete paper. I have two paragraphs missing that are substituted with bullet points of quotes and transition sentences. Yes, I do start drafting with only bullet points, but I could have had at least a decent conclusion paragraph.
In the final draft, I made a bunch of changes. For starters, I had complete paragraphs and a fairly well-written conclusion paragraph. I went back and made changes to how I cited my quotes and the awkward sentences that were littering the paper.
The changes between the first draft of this paper and the final draft of this paper shows just how much my writing had changed in a couple of weeks. I went from sentences that made no sense and choppy quotes to a well-written draft that clearly got my thoughts to the reader.
