Project 2 in English Composition is when I think made significant revisions to my writing process, both early on in the drafts and with final revisions before submission. It was clear while I was writing that the process I was using was different in many ways.

One revision to my writing process was the order in which I wrote my paper. Typically I liked to jump around the paper a lot in the first drafts. My thought process was to get the easy stuff done like putting quotes in and analyzing them to get to the first few word count checkpoints. In doing this, I typically wouldn’t have a proper introduction for quite a few drafts, and no thesis in site (I hate writing theses). Right from the beginning of project 2, I jumped into getting a whole introductory paragraph out. As the prompt was being read, I was already drafting it in my head, putting together two authors, Carr and Anderson, to come up with a basic thesis statement: “While both writers may disagree with each other regarding some of the different aspects of modern technology, both would agree that (Is this my thesis?) humanity has formed an irreversible and unbreakable bond with modern technology that has forever changed”. While this would not ultimately stay my thesis, my final draft took most of the thesis and made sure that my opinion was included: “While both writers may disagree with each other regarding some of the different aspects of modern technology’s influence on humans, both would agree with me that we have formed an irreversible and unbreakable bond with modern technology that has forever changed how we live our day-to-day lives.” What was great about this change I had was that I knew exactly what I was writing about from the beginning, in contrast to taking what I had written and trying to fit a thesis to it. Most of the remaining parts of the essay were written in the same way, from top to bottom, with a few exceptions where I found I really wanted to get some later ideas down.

Project 2 was also the first time that I decided to sit down and really do proper local revisions at the end. I found that the best way for me to do so was to use the built in text-to-speech tool on word. I find that instead of reading my essay in my head or out loud, maybe missing some errors, listening to the computer speak it aloud would alert me of any weird word choice, run-on sentences, etc. Throughout my piece I was able to find small errors, like accidentally typing “thar” instead of “that”, places where I might have unnecessarily used a comma, or a place where a comma is required that the grammar tool didn’t catch.

In conclusion for learning outcome 1, I think that the ways in which I changed my writing process greatly benefitted my ability to make global revisions, as my writing was more precise from the beginning, and my ability to make local revisions, having completed paragraphs earlier than I typically would.