Haelin Roberts
10/17/17
Prof. Emerson
Revision Plan
For my essay, the biggest change I need to make is to my thesis, when transitioning from my architectural draft to my actual rough draft, I found that I had much more evidence and ideas that went against my thesis rather than supporting it. I am much more comfortable writing to support the opposition, I think that the essay will be much better if I do it this way. As far as writing goes, when I looked at my last paper I saw that I had multiple issues where I would have a claim sentence that didn’t fully outline the topic of the paragraph, I want to focus on making my claim sentences very precise and full. Another thing that I did was leave “hit and run” quotes, I think this comes from thinking that the quote can explain itself, when I really need to clear it up for the reader and make my essay much more clear and strong. The overall strength of my claim sentences is what I think needs the most improvement on this essay, often they were too weak or in some cases too broad and then the paragraph below it struggles to outline all the points of my claim sentence. Often in my synthesis I would struggle to fully outline my point and left dangling modifiers that don’t give the right amount of detail to my paper and cause it to be underdeveloped.
Haelin,
I think you are really going to benefit from this revision plan. You seem to have taken time to identify important global edits that need to be made within your paper. First, I think that altering your thesis to fit your strongest arguments will be key to writing a successful final draft. I too often find that after completing a rough draft for a paper, my arguments and evidence do not always support or relate back to the overarching argument that my initial thesis had made. When this happens, I will go back, like you are planning to do, and change my thesis to match the strongest arguments that advance my paper. I often find it helpful to set up a “blueprint” thesis: layout the exact points you plan to hit on throughout your paper in chronological order right there in your thesis. For example, “I am arguing against technology because x,y,z”. Then, your first body paragraph(s) will hit on x, the next one(s) will hit on y and the final one(s) will talk about z. This will not only set your reader up for what is to come but will also help you when writing your claim sentences. I think that having the main topics of your body paragraphs in your thesis will help you to craft claim sentences that complicate or advance those topics as they relate to your thesis. I 100% relate to your trouble with hit and run quotes! I am not always sure how to analyze them after I place them into my paragraph. When I find myself in this situation, it is often because I am introducing my quote too late in the paragraph and all of my analysis – what should be the meat of the paragraph – actually came before I introduced the quote.