Blog 7 - Revising and Remixing Your Work

I chose to respond to chapter 9, “Revising and Remixing Your Work,” because this is a vital step into writing a successful and clear paper. After finishing a paper that only your eyes have seen it seems perfect from your perspective. Your clouded vision prohibits you from seeing any mistakes after a while since you’ve read and reread the same 1000 words over and over for however long it took you to write. You’ve become so used to seeing the words you could potentially go right over grammar and other mistakes. To you it may see like the most clearly presented argument you’ve ever seen yet, once someone else reads it and edits it their correction pen never stops making edits. This is a depressing site to see on your part since you believed this is the best paper however this is a pivotal moment. You realize you’re not perfect and others can indeed help you. I experienced this very recently with project 1. I finished and brought it to mat for our conference and after reading it to him realized I need to change 500 words out of the 1037. That wasn’t the best feeling but I changed it and received very positive feedback from my response group. Before I showed my response group however I needed someone to help me with the grammar portion of it because I truthfully suck at grammar, one of my downfalls. I sent it to my friend who will be attending John Hopkins University and he served as an angel. The paper was returned with the same content but after he fixed all my dumb errors the paper felt fluid and had maybe one grammatical error remained if any. So, case in point having someone else look over your work after you’ve done all you can with it is really a necessity and can turn your C+ paper into a A+ paper.