Reflexive Blog- Literacy Narrative 12/5

     Whenever I get an assigned a paper that offers some freedom when it comes to what to write about, I find myself taking far too long on deciding just that. Luckily for me, this literacy narrative assignment really helped me out with this problem. The activity we did on index cards at the beginning stages of this assignment  forced me to get out as many ideas as I could and either stick with one or move on to the next one. I eventually chose to write about a research paper that I wrote during my junior year of high school, and I noticed it was a topic I'd been thinking about since the first index card.

             


     Once I went through and got my entire first draft written out, I started to think about exactly what I had to change. In all of the major papers I have written, I've never really noticed the biggest changes in between drafts. I was just used to going through and correct errors while changing up a few paragraphs trying to make the paper flow more smoothly.



     When we were given the revision strategies, I decided to try some of them out and see if I could come up with any changes to my paper that I liked. The strategy that I found to be the most beneficial to me was definitely going though and criticizing my paper for three minutes, then praising my work for three minutes. Doing this really helped me get a better feeling of what I liked having in the paper and which parts I felt like I should try to rewrite.

     After revising the ideas that I wanted to make changes to, I focused on the organization and flow of my paper. I tried rewriting the first draft that I wrote using a different method of organization. I ending up staying with a sequence of events that was pretty close to my first draft through the whole project. I couldn't get myself to stay with many major changes that I tried. I did find it helpful to map out the parts of my paper in my daybook when I tried to rearrange it.
     This project was beneficial to me in many ways. I learned some new strategies for revision and ways to think in a different direction when feeling stuck with an idea. I also liked the way that this project made me realize what impact the research paper I wrote about actually had on me, and how it affected how I feel about my literacy.