After reading Anne Lamotts essay it honestly gave me a lot of hope with my paper. In her fourth paragraph she refers to the first draft as a “childs draft” in other words your essay where you get all your ideas on the paper lay them out for everybody to see and then effectively organize your paper. I honestly was not feeling confident about my first paper, its your first college essay and you don’t know what to expect. Now, I am not as worried. I feel like I got my ideas out in my first paper and now if I go back and expand on them a little more and organize it it will be better. Like Lamott says in the 7th paragraph I have to “trust the process”.
I have various goals as I approach my revision. After talking with my group today and taking what they have to say into consideration I came up with these following points of emphasis: I go back expand on some ideas they pointed out to me, go back and add some quotes to strengthen my arguments in a couple of paragraphs and lastly I need to refer back to the small pond analogy. My first priority is to go back and reread Southans essay and watch my ted talk again to possibly get some ideas to help my arguments. Next I am going to refer back to the small pond analogy and then focus on some points that they showed me I should expand on. I see my biggest challenge as expanding on some of the points, in my first draft I was struggling to write more but after hearing what they had to say I feel as though I can do it. I think since working in groups helped me out so much the first time I could ask some classmates for help if I come to a problem I cannot solve.
I agree with the sense of relief you felt after reading Lamott’s essay. I mentioned the same thing in my blog post. It is all about trusting the process and understanding that this is only the first draft; it doesn’t need to be perfect. I agree that is a great strategy to go back and reread Southan’s essay as well as watch your TED Talk. As you have seen in this class so far, rereading is key. You can gain a whole new understanding of the text after rereading. You mentioned that your biggest challenge could be expanding on some of the points you made. I suggest to add quotes that support your points. This is a great way to advance your argument. I like how you mentioned you’ll ask your peers for help if needed, this could be helpful since we all have an understanding of what you are going through.
I felt the same way after reading Lamott’s essay. I think the essay really helped clear up the whole writing process of an essay. It is a good thing that you have a better idea of what you are going to do in your next drafts to make your essay better. Rereading Southan’s esssy is a great idea and should really help you. For your quotes you can try to relate them to both the essay and the Ted talk.
I think asking for a peers help is a good when to get a different point of view on your paper. This may be able to help you generate more ideas that can help you support your arguments. I think that when you go back and re watch the TED talk and re read Southan’s essay might be able to pick up on things that you may have missed when reviewing it the first couple of times.