Demonstrate the ability to approach writing as a recursive process that requires substantial revision of drafts for content, organization, clarity (global revision), as well as editing and proofreading (local revision).
At the beginning of the semester, when reading the learning outcomes for this course, I believed I had already mastered the first learning outcome, that writing is a recursive process and revision needs to occur to make the writing better. Since I had always edited my essays at least once before handing them in, I believed I had already demonstrated my recursive writing process. Similarly to Sommer’s article, I had just focused on rewording my essay to explain the same quotes in different ways, not developed my writing like an experienced writer should. This revision process would reflect the ideas of Sommer’s “thesaurus philosophy of writing”. However, throughout the course of the semester, I had realized I was revising my essay in an incorrect way. Now I know that writing takes a lot of editing and revision, much more than I had usually done. Throughout the semester we had our projects be revised multiple times by multiple people. During the Big Data essay, I began my revision process by highlighting my quotes and the integration of them within my writing. Here I was able to make global revisions by noticing that I needed to integrate my quotes better and further develop my claims that related to the quotes, while explaining why the quotes mattered. This piece of global revision is important; had I not done this, my essay would not have made sense and readers would be wondering why I was including that quote and what it related to. Further along in the revision process of my Big Data essay, I met with my professor to address more global changes I could make to advance my essay. During this conference, we discussed that it would improve my paper if I expanded my claims. This would allow readers to understand more about my big data topic and the claims that I was presenting would be more clearly stated. After the conference, our class met with our peer review groups. It was during this step in the revision process that I was able to notice more sentence-level errors within my writing. My peer reviewers commented on grammar, improper MLA citations, and other issues in my writing on the sentence level. This began the process of focusing more on the sentence-level; as writing is a recursive process, there needs to be revision of the details as well as the main points. To continue sentence-level improvements, my tutor, Megan Grumbling, was able to review my essay and brought to my attention my continous use of improper parallelism. This was an issue I needed to fix within the sentence level of my writing in order to improve my overall essay. After the course of this semester, I was able to advance my revision process to one of Sommer’s experienced writers, by including new claims in my writing, further developing claims, and constantly adjusting my writing to fit my topic in different styles through revision. Here is my beginning thesis statement of my rough draft: “The collection of big data from secondary companies needs to protect patients’ confidentiality or privacy but promote patient contribution, so that more discoveries for treatments, diagnoses, and other medical advancements can be made through trends and other details.” Here is my final thesis statement that was edited and altered multiple time from the first draft to the final: “In their collection of big data, secondary companies need to protect patients’ confidentiality or privacy but still promote the value of big data, so that more discoveries for treatments, diagnoses, and other medical advancements, such as lowering healthcare costs, can be made through trends and other details.”
