After reading Lamott’s essay “Shitty First Drafts”, I noticed that her descriptions were similar to when I was writing my first draft. I found that I could really relate with what she was saying about writing a lot for the first draft and it being unorganized, then returning later to polish the writing and removing unnecessary sections. It is better to write as much as you can think of for the first draft because revising and editing later will help condense and bring out the main points of the essay.

Revision Plan
Goal: My goal is to reorganize my essay and add more of my own thoughts and opinions while reducing the summaries of the three authors.

To revise, first I plan to work on shortening the summaries that I wrote to describe specific studies or quotes that I used from the three authors. As my peers stated during the peer review, I agree that it would be better to spend more time adding my own thoughts and add more quotes to develop the thesis in a better way rather than summarizing too much. I think that this will be a challenge for me because I think that I will have trouble deciding what information is actually relevant or not and get straight to the point.
After doing this, I will read through my essay and try to reorganize my essay so that it flows better. I will do this by printing out my essay and then labeling which order I think that the paragraphs should go in. By taking this step first it would be easier to rearrange the essay on the computer and then have the computer read it to me, as suggested by a classmate. By having the computer read my essay to me, I could also find sections that don’t make sense and correct those mistakes as well.
If I find a challenge that is too difficult to solve on my own, I could go to SASC to receive feedback and help from a tutor or I could ask my friends for their opinions on my problem.