In this blog post, I will be reflecting on my Life-Choice memoir assignment I wrote for my English Composition 100 course. I have been working on this essay off and on for about 2 months, and I will be sharing my process of writing it from my first draft until my last draft.
After receiving the assignment and reading this assignment sheet, I wrote my first draft. My first draft seemed to be more telling instead of showing. My teacher, Sabatino Mangini, specifically said to start the paper by jumping into a scene. When I looked back at my original essay, I did not jump right into a scene. I started the essay with “A high stakes life choice that I have made was…” This was exactly how not to start my life choice essay. After realizing my essay was not written how it was supposed to be, I started the essay again and pictured myself back in the first scene I wanted to include in my essay. I started describing everything I saw, felt, and thought. After describing as much as I thought I could, I added some ideas from my first draft and ended up with my second draft. One of the requirements for this assignment was to have one thousand to one thousand and five hundred words. When I looked at the word count of my second draft, I had two thousand four hundred and twenty two words. The word could was way over the required amount. When I talked to Dr. Mangini about my essay, he gave me a challenge to complete: eliminate seven hundred words from my second essay. This made me nervous. I was not sure if I would even be able to eliminate this many words without erasing parts that were important to the story. However, I was still up for the challenge. I went home that night and started eliminating words. First, I started eliminating the bonus “P.S” part at the end because it was not needed to tell my story. Then I started going through my essay from the beginning to the end. I started eliminating sentences that were not needed to enforce the point I was making. Then I went through the essay again and tried crunching words and phrases together to lessen the word count. After doing all of this, I only eliminated around four hundred and fifty words. I still needed around two hundred and fifty more to get rid of. This is when I started taking out descriptive parts of the essay that I wanted to try and leave in. After taking these wanted phrases out, I eliminated six hundred and eighty four words. I figured I pretty much reached the goal of my teachers challenge; therefore, making my third draft. After reviewing my third draft, I found I did not like this draft as much as my second draft. I feel like I took too many details out of the essay making the essay not as descriptive. However, I did like the challenge of eliminating a large quantity of words and seeing how that could improve my essay or not. Looking at the big picture, the process I took to get to my third draft was a little painful; however, it was well worth the pain because I feel that I have improved my essay substantially. I realized that going back into my essay and revising my first draft improved my writing skills and improved my essay overall.
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Julia ThorntonI am using this blog for my English course and beyond Archives
December 2017
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