Reflection on Project 2

The Potential Within Revision

English, Angi "Back Flip" (6/9/2010) via Flickr. Attribution0NonCommercial 2.0 Generic Creative Commons License

After completing my Rhetorical Analysis for Project 2, I'm feeling pretty good about my writing process and changes I made to get to my Final Draft. In this blog post, I will be reflecting on my revision process.

What was specifically revised from one draft to another?

• I mainly fixed punctuation mistakes and inserted sentences that created a larger idea for my analysis.

Point to global changes: how did you reconsider your thesis or organization?

• I re-arranged my thesis to flow better with my introduction, but otherwise my thesis fit my organization perfectly.

What led you to these changes? A reconsideration of audience? A shift in purpose?

• After talking with my professor, I realized the importance of including some larger purpose for my audience to pursue. While my purpose remains the same, I decided to connect with my audience on a greater level and create a better conclusion by giving them a compelling and specific call to action.

How do these changes affect you credibility as an author?

• I think these changes will enhance my credibility, because there is no way for them to dissuade my audience as far as I can tell; they will only enhance the reading experience of my audience.

How will these changed better address the audience or venue?

• These changes will allow the audience to maintain a much more energetic focus on the issues within my example source, and see how those issues can be manipulated rhetorically.

Point to local changes: how did you reconsider sentence structure and style?

• I re-read my analysis and looked at the flow it had. I manipulated sentence ordering and structure to allow for an easier transition from idea to idea and make the paper seem like a logical flow of thought.

How will these changes assist your audience in understanding your purpose?

• These changes will make ideas and their relationships with each other clearer to my readers. If they see rhetorical analysis as a logical flow of thought about a text as opposed to shifting ideas and analysis, they may be able to get a better grasp of how to practice it.

Did you have to reconsider the conventions of the particular genre in which you are writing?

• Not really. The great thing about this genre is that large paragraphs and sentences are the norm, and I had a lot to analyze in my text, so it was a perfect combination!

Finally, how does the process of reflection help you reconsider your identity as a writer?

• This has helped me to better understand my role and what I am capable of. I can change my audience's perception of analysis in so many ways just by how I write and how I alter my writing for them. I have a lot of power both in my initial writing process, and especially in my revision.

Reflection: After looking over Mark and Katherine's Reflections, I saw that we all struggled a bit with this Project, but that we eventually figured it out in our revision processes. While Katherine seemed to struggle with her credibility as a writer, Mark appeared to have more issues with the context of the analysis. They both went through what I did, and it just goes to show that we're all encountering new ways of writing and understanding texts. Looking back at Project 1, I realize that I should have gone to office hours for more help understanding the situation of that project and get advice on how to place my issue in context. Now, I plan to alter my writing process so that it includes at least one meeting with my professor to clarify my position as an author in the context of a project.