Domek 1 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 Domek 2 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.