Revising for Dummies

When this class started, I did not have a good way of revising essays.  But, I can officially say now that I do.  We have learned various ways of editing papers, and for me, they are new.

I remember the first revision workshop.  Our group was the only one who did it wrong.  Instead of individually reading it and critiquing them on it, we all read ours and then revised.  It worked, but not as well as the assigned way.  We were not able to finish in the fifty minutes we were allotted, and most of us did not remember most of each others essays at that point either.

So, then the second workshop came and we knew what to do.  We read the papers one by one and gave tips to the writer, and I might add, it went smoothly.  This part is actually my favorite of the revising because we each would read our own stories out loud and catch all the little mistakes that came about.  Then, if we missed our own mistakes, classmates would catch the majority of them and let us know.  Although, there were lots of mistakes on my paper; I did not get down about it.  The classmates would tell me what they thought was great about the story while telling me what needs more description.

Later in the semester, we got this punctuation sheet which is absolutely amazing.  It helped us understand punctuation like I personally have never learned before.  The detail and rules were all on one page.  At first, the paper was confusing, but once the teacher started going over it, punctuation started becoming extremely easy.  Yes I am not an expert with it, but I do understand punctuation much better than before.

All in all, I enjoyed the revising techniques Professor Mathes taught us not because it was easy, or took up all class period.  But, the revising techniques actually work.