ESSAY ASSIGNMENT: THE GENUINE REVISION
Everyone deserves a shot at redemption. This is yours.
This assignment is an opportunity to make a previous essay better. Instead of writing a new essay, you will revise and/or rewrite one of your previous essays.
When you are writing for classes, you usually have to work on a very limited timeline. This time pressure is typical for students and for people in many (perhaps most) professional settings. However, it's also true that professional writers and other people who write serious and important things often spend weeks, months, and even years working of a piece. Now of course they don't spend that time fooling with sentences and fixing comma errors - they undertake a process of real, intensive consideration of the piece, their purposes in writing it, the intended audience, the content, the order, the tone, the way ideas are connected, and everything else.
THE TASK
You need to choose one of your previously-submitted essays and do a genuine revision of it.
Think of the original essay as a rough draft. (To be honest, in most cases, that's really what it is.)
Some guidelines
• The revised essay should consist of no more than 50% of the original essay. You should have entirely new sentences and paragraphs, either in addition to the original material or replacing it.
o (It is also very possible that your new essay will be close to 100% new. That is fine)
o (No, professional writers don't impose arbitrary rules like this on themselves. They don't have to: they genuinely care about what they're writing. They won't put their name on a thing they aren't proud of. If I could somehow make my students feel that way, I wouldn't have to do anything else. If you have some ideas about this, I'd love to hear them.)
• Think about organizing your ideas in the most effective way. Consider different approaches.
• Think about completeness: have you said everything that is necessary to say on each important point in the essay? It's possible that you have important points buried inside paragraphs that are focused elsewhere; you might want to pull such important points out and give them their own paragraph in which you can develop them more fully.
• Look for material in the original essay that is not necessary: things that are irrelevant, redundant, or just over-explained. Are details adding to the essay's purpose or distracting from it? Is there material that seems to belong in a different essay?
• Think about flow: Can the reader easily see the connections from one idea to the next? Are you using transitions to make these connections clear?
Which essay should you choose? On what basis should you pick one to revise/rewrite? Let's talk about this in class. But in general, you should pick the one on the topic that interests or inspires you the most.