The Art of Revision

In Sonia Nazario's passage "Transforming One-Hundred Notebooks into Thirty-five Thousand Words" there are many things that I can relate to as an amateur writer on a smaller scale. She went through many revisions trimming pages and paragraphs from her Los Angeles Times series in order to publish it as a book. The series only included about one-tenth of the information she recorded about the young boy, Enrique. Now as an amateur writer I can relate to this on a smaller scale where I have to make many revisions for essays and reflections in school. Sometimes it is frustrating because you feel like you have so much information and you want to share it with people who read it, but the question is, do they really need that information? Nazario said "I learned that it's okay to go from A to C and skip B." Often times when I write I ramble on and in the revisions for my essays I realize the sentence or paragraph is not really significant to the story. One strategy that I would like to implement into my future writings is to repeat significant but minor details that appear later in the story. Whenever this happens in movies or books I feel like people have an aha-moment and realize why that detail was mentioned. Nazario used this in her book where Enrique proves to his mother's question "What are you wearing"  by telling her that he is wearing "Two left shoes." Anoter strategy that I need to work on is when revising my writings I need to read my work more critically like Nazario does. She says when she reads her writings she asks herself "Is this really necessary? What is lost by cutting it?" These questions can be used to trim your writings to make them more dense and won't bore your readers by rambling on about minor, insignificant details.

Reflection to Essay #2

Essay #2 was harder to write than Essay #1 for me. I feel like I had trouble supporting some parts of my argument that originality no longer exists. Also, the paper itself was more difficult to write in general because it had to be a persuasive essay where in the first essay we were just writing about ourselves and past experiences. In my final copy I will add a strong revoke. I completely forgot to and since my paper did not struggle with length it slipped my mind. But I plan to revise it and add a strong revoke because this is key to a good persuasive essay. Some other improvements I would like to make is to add some more quotes from Barthe's essay "Death of the Author" and also to state some more strong supporting evidence in my paragraph about music. There were some strong points I felt like my paper had. For example I do like how my essay flows as one piece of writing and I also like how I was able to collaborate and organize my thoughts. I feel like I could make the paper more clear and concise in certain parts for my revision.