ENG 1101 OL32 Fall 2021

One more closeup, please

You will be getting a survey from the school. It will come from “SPSSurveys” and will probably have “Student Evaluation of Teaching” in the subject line. Please fill that out for our class by Dec. 17! The school needs those! That said, I, personally, have one more thing for you to address: my own survey. The link is below. Please click on it, and thanks! -Prof. S.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdu7nsZYIfU51775DEktaWzAXI9Ht0GQUdjUIzTDja9Ynw7dw/viewform?usp=sf_link

• “A search of the literature reveals relatively few articles or books on the rewriting process. I have a commonplace book which has grown from one thin journals to 24 3 inch thick notebooks with more than 8000 entries…”
• “He had to write and write and write to find out what he had to say. He was embarrassed and didn’t want his collegues to know how dumb he is.”
• “Discovery, however, can be a frightening process. The terror of the empty page is real, because you simply do not know what you are going to say before you you say it..”

Question 1 –

The distinction Murray makes from both External and Internal revision is that, with Internal revision you are making the revisions for the only person that will be reading it which is you. So it would be notes or something that you would make for yourself and for your own understanding. While for external is more for broader revision, as in revision for others, not for only your own understanding but for the understanding of others, so having a clear idea and format the revision or others understanding, like a homework.

Question 4 –

I have always seen revision as a bit of more steps to writing that you can cut if you can have a clear idea beforehand and refine writing as you write your first draft. But after trying and seeing that revision might not be a option, it might be necessary, for some of my recent papers and videos, I’ve not had the luxury to do them once and they would be perfect, instead its been more work, I was wondering if I was just getting to be a perfectionist, but no, at some point you start seeing things that you want to fix and or can make better. With this want, I’ve felt like I just want to revise more, i want to start making better pieces of writing, I thought this was just me but after reading this, this is just a self conscious reaction to just wanting to express myself better and create a writing that can be better understanding and more fluent to read for not only me but other readers.

• “Just get it all down on paper because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means. “
• Writing what comes to your mind and little by little deconstructing it and leaving the essentials in the final draft, trusting the process little by little. At some point with this process the final draft will come together.
• “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.”

Question 3 –

After reading the excerpt, it is clear to me that the writer is trying to express that the first writing will never be perfect, to a good final piece you must write what you feel and yes you’ll have your mind working and even writing way too much in your first draft.  After this first draft you can take all the essentials and the ideas of this and start refining it to create a final piece. The writer expresses this by giving anecdote of a restaurant, and have the first time is going to be the experience, but then you keep going and keep tasting and finally you get what you like. This can be a good comparison because in writing we cant always be perfect about it. The first thing we choose or even write about can be a run on idea, but after trying new things and refining the ideas to finally get something shorter but better then the final draft, it can be that the first draft can be a run on sentence and many times be just a bullet point in a paragraph. One good way to think about it the first draft is in my opinion and with influence of the reading, having a high school phase and every year that passes is like a revision till you get your final product in senior year. Lamott is trying to express that no writing is perfect in the first go, but it is something that with time and revision it can be perfected and with this constant process it can be like second nature and writing will be much easier and would flow differently than if its done last minute.