16.1: 17.1 The Classroom Lecture and Activity

 

SLOs-Engage in a recursive process of prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading  -Engage in a reflective process of evaluating their own drafts and those of others

Revising an Essay

Writing is considered a process. While you engage in the writing process as you write your essays, there are often times when you realize you still need to revise after you have turned in a final draft. If you are lucky, your instructor will let you revise the essay. However, revisions should be done before turning a final draft. In order to avoid this, it is important to revise full drafts with a critical eye. Learning to self-critique your work and determine what to revise can be tricky, but if you start to practice looking at your draft critically, you will be on your way to revisions that more closely reflect your ideas.

• A substantial revision means taking a closer look at your writing and making big changes.
• A revision is not changing two words or adding a sentence or adding a comma. 
• A substantial revision starts with one main question:

Did you complete the assignment and meet the requirements?

One way to revise is to look at your draft using the rubric. What categories will the essay be evaluated on? Do you understand the descriptions in each category?  Here is an example. Let us say that your research essay is getting assessed based on the following categories: Focus and claim development, research development and engagement, organization, writing fluency, and documentation. For the first category, to score satisfactorily, you will need to “Generally, present clear main points that are sustained throughout the essay. At times purpose is unclear but has a thesis.” Looking at this column on a rubric may seem straight to the point, but what does ‘generally’ really mean? You should get clarification from the instructor, but you can also ask yourself, was there any time that I went off topic, ranted, needed to write ‘now back to the main point’ in any parts of my essay? To check for focus and claim development, choose a highlighter color and highlight your thesis, all your topic sentences and ending sentences, and any other transitions that directly show you are supporting the thesis. Do not highlight quotes, paraphrases, and summaries. For this category, look at only your claim and your own explanations.

In this way, you should see if the essay is indeed focused or if it went off the rails at any moments. You can use this method and the rubric given to you by your instructor to go through each category.

You can also use a critique sheet to help you ask the right questions about your draft.

Here is an example of what one looks like.

Example \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Self review gives students a chance as writers to see how well their ideas translate into words on the page and analyze what it is they want to achieve with a particular essay. The same questions they ask themselves are the same questions a peer or tutor reviewer will ask about the draft.

Instructions: Use this worksheet as a guide as you read, comment, and ask questions about your draft. Use the questions as a checklist. Please answer all questions in complete sentences.

Rhetorical Situation

Purpose

1. What is your purpose for writing the essay? What do you want the audience to do, think or feel?  What is the thesis statement?

Audience

2. Who is the wider audience: people that may not have an immediate investment in the topic and ask so what? How do you reach them?  Who is the immediate audience: people who have a high stake in the topic and who already care. These are also people that could solve the problem. What type of tone do/should you use?

Development/Structure

3. What are your supporting ideas? What specific rhetorical strategies/styles have you used to develop these ideas? How did you organize your paragraphs? (Topically [Least important to most important or vice versa], Chronologically, Step by Step)

Documentation

4. Summarize the evidence you use to support your main point. How many quotations do [or should] you use, and which quotes are used or would be supportive to your claim? What type of sources do you use? Do any of these sources point to a citation on the Works Cited page?

 

5. What transitions do you use before and after quotes, summaries and paraphrases to distinguish between what you say and what the sources say? Give an example of the type of transitions you use to connect ideas from sentence to sentence and in between paragraphs.

 

6. What other ideas do you have for this essay that is not in this draft?

 

Classroom Activity:

Look at the selected draft. This draft is at the perfect to point to start revising by thinking about expanding ideas, adding explanations, sources, and looking critically how the argument is coming across to the reader. The writer has started to consider what to revise and how to revise by highlighting their thesis and some main points.They have also considered the rhetorical appeals that they used so far. What do you think? Using the categories from a chosen rubric and/or answering the questions from the critique worksheet, discuss what the writer should revise.

Cedar Martinez
Eng 101
Argument Rough Draft

Why Banning Books is Harmful to High School Students

During high school, self exploration and learning about the world is very important. Students learn more about their interests, passions, and who they want to be. In school, books play a big role in self discovery, as students are usually presented with books to read in their school library and are able to pick something that appeals to them. Books teach students lessons through stories of people they identify with, or teach them more about a subject they’re passionate about. In addition to this, books also teach students about the world around them, through the experiences of others with different cultures and identities. Book bans in high schools obstruct this journey of self-growth and intellectual development in students, creating barriers that should really be pathways for them to learn about themselves and the world. Metaphor, comparing book bans to a physical obstruction on personal progress. It is up to teachers, faculty, and the learning resources they provide to lead students into the right direction in their life. Banning books also keeps students from engaging in further learning, due to limiting exposure to diverse perspectives, limiting their curiosity, and restricting academic freedom, hindering their learning completely. Young adult books should not be banned in public high schools and libraries because it disables the ability for students to develop critical thinking, inhibits a further passion for learning, and prevents students from truly learning about themselves and the world; however, it is also the responsibility of schools and faculty to promote the importance of learning and self-discovery in students. Pathos and logos, a linear/logical train of thought on how this affects children, and pathos in that you draw on emotions about the kids losing an educational experience.

This censorship that comes from book bans disables the ability for students to think for themselves. They aren’t allowed to read what they may be interested in, whether that be books from authors of a similar background, or topics ranging from history to science. What these book bans do is make students believe that their interests or values are off-limits or unacceptable, repetition even when that may not be the case. Banning books also deprives students from the range of perspectives there are in the world, making their opinions very one-sided. Both of these issues prevent students from developing critical thinking.

In the film,The ABCS of Book Banning by MTV Documentary Films, they feature a speech made by Grace Lin at a school board meeting in Florida where she compares banned books to burning books done by the Nazis in world war II.

Ethos and pathos. A person with an established reputation in the topic speaking on a particular issue and plays on a memory in the collective conscience that draws on our emotions “Banned books and burning books are the same, both are done for the same reason: fear of knowledge. Fear is not freedom. Fear is not liberty. Fear is control.” Grace Lin pushes and reinstates the idea that banning books keeps students from thinking for themselves because the banning puts a restriction on them, controlling what they read and learn. This prevents students from deciding for themselves what is wrong or right, as banning books makes that decision for them.

What this control also does is prevents students from developing a further passion for learning, whether that be for reading alone or researching topics they are interested in. When students have restricted access to books, they are closed off completely from engaging in any further learning.

Both of these issues show that placing restrictions on books in schools prevents students from truly learning about themselves and the world. When certain books are banned, students can miss out on opportunities to see themselves reflected in a book and to explore their own identities, beliefs, and values through the characters and stories they read. Even when the stories aren’t about people like them, books about people of minority groups or less fortunate backgrounds allow students to figure out their place in the world and develop empathy and emotional intelligence, which is essential to understanding themselves and others. Banning books that deal with issues such as race, gender, sexuality, and identity can prevent students from exploring and understanding different aspects of their own identities. Cause and effect.

Many books that are banned are about empowering minority groups, banning these books with stories of resilience and triumph can deprive students of the motivation and encouragement they need to overcome obstacles and achieve their goals.

Although this may be true, many people believe that faculty in schools play a bigger role in students' self discovery and promoting learning. Teachers and faculty should be able to create a space for students to develop their own interests and want to learn outside the classroom as well, which as a result will also make students learn about who they are. However, the problem with this idea is that if a school district is banning books, the topics within these books are most likely banned to be spoken about in classrooms too. Teachers are not allowed to talk about things that students might be curious or passionate about, which reinforces the idea in students that what they care about is wrong or unacceptable. repetition

Books should not be banned in schools as it prevents students from truly learning about who they are and what they are interested in and passionate about. Instead of teaching students about having agency and having confidence in what they believe in, they teach students that what they care about is wrong. It censors the history of many people of different backgrounds, and tells students that anything within these banned books is unacceptable. In essence, book bans are a form of censorship that goes against the principles of education and deprives students of the opportunity to engage with literature as a means of broadening their understanding of the world and themselves. Pathos

 

Post Draft Outline

Another way to revise your draft is to create a post draft outline.

 

Transcript of presentation. You are probably used to creating pre-draft outline as part of a pre-writing strategy. Pre-draft outlines are good for generating ideas. But let's be honest, how many times did you look at that outline while you were actually drafting?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Even if you did refer to it while you were drafting, it's very likely that you didn't follow it exactly. As you drafted your essay, you probably made small changes as well as large ones, along the way. As you encountered the "real world" situation your essay faced your initial outline might have become obsolete.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That's where the post-draft outline comes in.

Post-draft outlines let us see the main ideas all at once. Even better, they let us experiment with changes with no risk. It's easier to rearrange a few sentences than a whole essay. It's very hard to get the big picture of what a multi-page essay looks like, structurally. Remembering what's on page 3, by the time you get to page 5, can be difficult.

So, let's try it.

• Step 1: Count the number of paragraphs in the draft.
• Step 2: Open a new Word document. Create a numbered list on that document--one number for each paragraph in your draft. The example above has 7 paragraphs.
• Step 3: On the new document, write no more than ONE SENTENCE describing what the paragraph is about, for each number on the list. Less is fine, like a phrase.
• Step 4: Step back and view the completed list. Read through it, line by line. This should allow to you to get a sense of what the flow of the overall product is, at the moment.

 

• If you see repetitive ideas in different paragraph summaries
• If you had a hard time simplifying a paragraph's contents into one sentence...

Then that's a sign that there are too many primary ideas in that paragraph, and it should be broken into smaller paragraph pieces. You’ll need to condense these ideas down, combine them, or delete something.

You can also use this opportunity to experiment. What happens if you swap the order of your examples? What about if you move the story of your personal experience to the first paragraph or to the next-to-last paragraph?

As we covered before, it's a whole lot easier to move one small sentence around on a page, then to try and envision half of a paragraph elsewhere in a full draft.

 

 

 

 So far, we've been talking about the entire essay draft.

But this same technique can be used on a smaller scale, too: To bring a closer look to one particular paragraph that seems problematic.

 

 

 

 

 

To look at a paragraph, do the same basic thing:

-Count the number of sentences in that paragraph; create a numbered list that has one number per sentence; and jot a summary of what each sentence says on that list. Try not to rewrite the whole paragraph. This can be a bit more difficult.

 

 

 

You should be able to quickly spot repetition, bulk, or empty lines in this way.

This is probably too time-consuming to do with EVERY paragraph, but if you've got one that just doesn't want to behave, give this a try.

I think you'll find this post-draft outline very useful to see your essay in a new way. Hopefully this offers inspiration to move forward and look at revising in a new way.

 

 

 

 

 

Composition II. Authored by: Alexis McMillan-Clifton. Provided by: Tacoma Community College. Retrieved from: http://www.tacomacc.edu. Project: Kaleidoscope Open Course Initiative. License: CC BY: Attribution

Post Draft Outlines for revision https://quillbot.com/courses/english-composition-ii/chapter/discussion-post-draft-outline/

Images for Post Draft Outline By U. A.