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Evan Domek
Stefanie Trout
English 250 PJ
April 18th, 2013
Assignment 3 Revision Reflection
For the written part of my portfolio, I choose to revise my Assignment 3 essay. In this
essay, I discussed John Taylor Gatto’s rhetorical strategies in his essay titled Against School. I
chose to revise this assignment because I completed it a while ago so I knew I would be able to
look at it with a new perspective and it also received my lowest grade for any of the assignments.
I knew there was a lot I could do to this piece to make it much better and I believe it is now
improved from my original final draft. During my revision, I deleted many sentences,
restructured many others, and kept most of the main points the same as before.
First, I would like to start by discussing what I kept the same. After rereading my
original essay for the first time since receiving a grade on it, I realized the substance of my essay
was exactly what I wanted. I immediately knew that in my revised copy, I still wanted it to
discuss the ethos, pathos, and organizational strategy of the essay. I wanted to keep these as my
topics because I believe they were the most important components of the essay. I also decided to
leave the title as is because I believe it works for the assignment. As well as keeping the
substance the same, I also kept my style consistent with the style in the original. Although I did
keep the substance and style the same, I deleted and restructured many sentences.
After rereading my original essay, I also realized many of the sentences did not flow well
and needed to change. A couple of times I said, “He gave credibility to his sources” or
something along those lines and I decided change it to “he established credibility for his
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sources.” The word “established” works so much better in this situation and spices up the
vocabulary a bit, which I like to do if possible. Along with restructuring many sentences, I also
did my fair share of deleting. Specifically, I deleted the second paragraph of my original essay,
which was a short summary of the text. The placement of the summary just did not seem right to
me. After thinking about it for a while and asking some other people, I decided that instead of
having a separate paragraph for the summary, I shortened it down to about two sentences and
included it into my introductory paragraph. I believe this was a good idea because it allowed the
beginning of my essay to have a nice flow. So I believe I fixed the flow of my essay and
restructured many sentences for the better, but I had a difficult time coming up with information
to add.
I thought long and hard about additional information that I could include to increase the
effectiveness of my essay and I could not come up with much. I thought it would be easy to
come up with information of some sort to add to my essay, but it turned out to be difficult. The
reason it was so difficult was Gatto already included so much information in his essay that
outside sources were unneeded because Gatto established credibility for all of his sources
including himself.
I do believe my revised copy is more successful in achieving its purpose and reaching out
to its audience. Even though I was unable to include additional information to essay, my original
sentence structure was my major downfall and I believe I fixed it for the better. I also believe
changing my entire summary paragraph into a couple of sentences allowed my essay to flow
much better. Throughout the semester, I have come to a new understanding of the importance of
revising and I now believe it is the most important part of the writing process.