Throughout the semester, my revision skills have vastly improved and have become more effective since the beginning of the semester. One of the most important facts that I learned about global revision is to make every paragraph specifically relating to the thesis or crafting a new thesis based on the ideas in my body paragraphs after creating the rough or “free” draft. Even though I still struggle with crafting the perfect thesis, I feel that I have a better understanding of how to achieve this. For example, in my significant writing project which my essay was based on the relation of art within the field of dentistry and how using art, could make complex topics easier to understand and could lead to further advancements within the field. The free draft of my essay included a paragraph where I used a quote from Steven Pinker’s article, “Science is not Your Enemy”, that didn’t clearly relate to the claims I was making in that specific body paragraph. In the free draft, I used his quote which stated, “A consilience with science offers the humanities countless possibilities for innovation in understanding. Art, culture, and society are products of human brains.” I tried to connect this quote to my claim which was that using comparisons and metaphors in classes could help make concepts easier to understand. This quote was disconnected from the claim and the overall thesis. As a result, I had to select a more relevant quote from the other texts and analyze them properly so that it would relate to my thesis better and would help to further support my claims. Also, I learned that explicitly noting connections in my writing so that the reader can clearly understand my intentions instead of having to create their own interpretations to try to understand what my goal was. For example, in the introduction paragraph of my final draft, I mentioned how art was used in history and had to clearly describe how the relationship between history and dentistry. Without stating this connection, including these ideas would have seemed random or insignificant to my overall argument.
For local revisions, I also feel that I am looking deeper at sentence level errors and am able to see these errors more easily than I did before by reading my essay out loud or having the computer read it to me. By doing this, I found many errors that I would have otherwise not noticed by reading in my head. Also, I found that I have improved in using MLA citations and the intricate parts that go into crafting a work cited page and using in-text citations. After fixing these issues, I found that rearranging paragraphs in my essay was beneficial to the development of the main argument in my essay and appeased the flow of it.
