My Revising Process

My revising process went better than expected.  I think I organized my paper much better since my “vomit draft.”  In the first draft, I kind of wrote about one idea, went to another idea, then ultimately came back to the original one.  Through revising, I was able to organize the paper much better so that it really had a logical flow of thought to it.  Even though it went well overall, there were still some frustrating parts to the process.  The hardest thing for me was to delete things that I have already written.  I had to get past the personal aspect of my writing and approach it critically.  The best analogy I can think of is a game of madden.  The most frustrating thing that can happen is when you play an entire game, forget to save, and then have to replay it.  Once I have already completed something, I hate to have to do it over again.  But, once I realized that I wasn’t as much doing it over again as I was making it better, the revising process went pretty smoothly.  There were several tools that helped me with the revising process.  First, the most useful tool of revising was to print out my paper and approach it as if it were another writer’s.  In the past, I have really only revised through my computer.  When I printed it out however, I was really able to see the flow of the paper better, as well as grammatical mistakes I could mark down with a pen.  In the future, I will always print my drafts out and revise them by hand.  Additionally, it helped me to speak my paper aloud.  This is always the last step before my final draft, and I usually catch a couple of mistakes I couldn’t while reading it.  Looking at the comparison between by initial and final drafts, I know the revising process was a success!