My first draft was in full definition a rough draft. It was a full summary. There was no sign of a thesis or my opinion. The quotes were fragments and unfulfilling. Overall it was not a good essay, and I knew it. I’m passionate about environmental issues, that’s why I’m in the major I am now, so this paper was getting bombarded with my anger towards human ignorance when it comes to the planet. I wanted every detail Mann had given me on that document. This, of course, is not good writing. After a peer review and essentially a meltdown of not knowing what to do, I ended up cutting the entirely of the summarization I had done and started fresh. It was hard to rebound from such a reset, but it became a mission to complete it. I was told by my peer review group that my wording was good, and that my thesis was relatively solid. Those things stayed, but a lot changed.

Locally, I worked on MLA citation and getting the grammar and sentence structure smoothed out. In the first paper, I had slacked greatly on correct MLA formatting and it took away from the formality of the paper. I worked on transitions between paragraphs and trying to make sure what I introduced was done properly. I did, in the end, still have some local mistakes, but it was a part of my process that I made sure to address.

Globally, I cracked down HARD on making sure I had an apparent thesis and that I provided enough analysis on my quotes. I hadn’t done well with that in my first paper, and I was determined to get better at it. I changed my quotes a lot during the revision process and ended up paraphrasing a lot of things instead. I ended up writing this entire paper on my own, and I put a lot of faith in myself when it came to integrating my own ideas into the paper. I also tried to not just scrape the surface of things, but to actually dig deep into the ideas I brought up.

Overall, I think the biggest thing that helped me was me reading the paper out loud over and over. It helped me pick out problems in the flow and find areas that didn’t make sense or just shouldn’t be included.