Revision is Hard

Revision is Hard!

Hard to teach.

Hard to do.

I often ask students how they revised assignments for my class.

 

Recently, students told me how they revised their *I-search papers.

 

Here is a list of things they told me that might be useful:

 

 

~Added a more attention grabbing introduction

~ Checked to make sure each section transitioned well from one to the next

~Rearranged things

~ Eearranged ideas to better fit my new organization

~ Decided that one of the journal articles originally chosen did not answer any of the questions I had

~Read the paper a couple of times making sure everything 'looked' and sounded the way that I wanted it to

~ The one method I find that works well for me is reading the paper out loud so that I can physically hear the wording.

~Put more of my personal feelings about the subject area

~ My interview needed some adjustments because I included too much information the first time.

~Added more of what I knew before I started to write this paper

~Replaced a source

~ Put in my interview

~Made sure I had each section required in the rubric

~Elaborated more

~Changed the wording

~ I asked myself: Can the reader tell what my main question is? Can they tell what I knew before I researched? Is it clear what I learned from each source? Are my conclusions clear? I tweaked each paragraph accordingly. I worked to make sure that each paragraph flowed and linked together and that the paper sounded more like a narrative than a dry research paper.

~ I used a lot of acronyms before without considering whether the audience would know what they stood for

 

 

*I-search papers are "research papers on topics that come out of a student’s curiosity and need." See

Macrorie, K. (1988). The I- search paper: Revised edition of searching writing.

Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.