Jacob Hickey
English 110-H4
Professor Miller
In detail, describe your experiences drafting writing projects. And what about revision? What did that look like? What was your process? How did it work for you?
My high school’s English department made it a priority to teach us thesis statements and how to support them in any writing. They taught us that it is critical to produce a thesis statement and then be able to back this idea with quotes or knowledge and analysis. We discussed this process every year in order to ensure we did it correctly. We were also taught that writing does not happen overnight. It is a time-consuming, multi-step process that requires re-reading a piece and re-writing it over and over until the finished product flows exactly the way you want it to. However, in the Chapter 3 reading assigned to us this week, it indicates there are even more steps than we used in my high school classes.
I come from a very small high school in Maine where everyone knows each other. Last year, in my AP English class made up of eight students, we often read and edited each other’s writing projects. Collectively, we were very comfortable providing honest feedback with the intent of helping each other improve, and were able to give constructive criticism of our works without being scared of hurting people’s feelings. Typically, our teacher would assign us an essay or a writing journal at the beginning of the week and have us draft this piece for either the next class or next week. We drafted our own work and then came to class next time prepared to analyze and read others’ works. This provided feedback on what they did well and what we thought they could work on. We sat in a circle of desks with our teacher among us and in a counterclockwise direction, read each others’ work and passed them on to the next classmate. After we had read and studied each paper, we wrote down notes on what we felt were strong points of the piece and what we felt could be worked on. Then, our teacher would individually tell us how we did in her view, and in the opinions of our classmates. It was helpful to see how others viewed the organization of our ideas and how we tied them into our thesis statements. After this, we would take this constructive criticism and work on our own to improve them. I loved our interactive way of revising writings and getting immediate feedback from both our teacher and our classmates. I think it’s helpful to have multiple sets of eyes reviewing because each person provides a different perspective that only helps to make the piece better. It worked well for me as I like to be involved in class discussions and not necessarily just working on my own paper.
