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Rochelle Myers Eric Chemberlin English 111-Critical reflection December 4, 2013 Revision When first being introduced to my multisource synthesis I felt like I had a little bit of background knowledge about it from English 110. But I was still very nervous because this was English 111 and they expect a lot more out of you. So that scared me a little bit, choosing a topic was also kind of difficult. All my professor had told us was to pick six different sources out of our Exploring Relationships: Globalization and Learning in the 21st Century course book. So I had to find six sources that connected and talked about similar things. This was very difficult for me to figure out what I wanted my main point to be. After contemplating for a few weeks on what I wanted to do my paper on and what to make my main point I finally figured out a topic but it was still unclear on what I wanted to say. When I first sat down to write out some ideas I had decided on a good place to start. I figured that if I just extended my problem paper then that would go smoother and make this easier for me. Well that thought was somewhat true. But I had no idea where to really start after that. In class we sat down and just wrote for a few minutes straight that seemed to really help. I got a page and a half done by just sitting there writing out my thoughts. Starting my multi-source synthesis I actually started in the beginning of my paper because thats where I was thinking at the time. I didnt write my introduction or conclusion until everything was done. When I started with the body though I took paragraphs out of my problem paper because in my problem paper I problematized two articles and they matched my topic I chose to write about. Finding four other articles to match those two was not to bad to find. But they were still a little pain. Mostly because when writing my synthesis I chose to put my topic as writing drafts and problematizing how authors dont just sit down and write one draft and its perfect while the rest of us have to write a bunch of drafts. What I realized what was wrong with this topic was I did not have an exact main point throughout the paper so all it did was fall apart. I had to come up with a main point so I could connect all of my sources together. When actually thinking about it and what all my articles were about I talked with my professor and realized I already had a main point but didnt realize it so I didnt state it. All of my articles were actually connected by revision and so was my story growing up. Everything revolved around revision so I had decided to make that my main point throughout my paper. What had made me realize that I didnt have a main point and that my paper fell apart by the end of it was when we had traded papers through different professors. Those

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professors read through our papers and had a rubric to follow. Off that rubric they were to give us things to fix. When I got my paper back she said it was unorganized and did not have a main point she got lost half way through about what I was talking about. Thats what made me realize I did not state a main point and chose to make my main point about revision. Starting my first body paragraph I chose to use the article Shitty First Drafts written by Anne Lamott. This was not an academic article for my audience and thats why this was a little more difficult than the other articles I chose for the decisions I had to make. I had to find the academic points out of this article because all our articles chosen were to be academic. But the reason that I chose to begin with this article was because everyone has the wrong idea about authors in their head. People think that authors can just sit down and write their ideas in just one draft without revision. But it just does not work that way and it makes me so mad that people wont understand that is not how it really works. When talking about how authors actually have to write in the article Lamott uses a quote to explain this is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third
drafts. Authors grow up learning how to write papers from the basics just like a normal student does and revises everything they write. This is also why I chose Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle written by Min-Zhan Lu, because she learns how to write the basics and that revision is important to her writing. She was born in china but grew up in the United States and had to learn a new culture so she knew what it was like to learn the basics. When she learns all of this she realizes that We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid (326) She struggled so much at first when growing up because all the rest of the people around her caught right on to everything because they did not have to focus on learning that culture they already knew it. I thought that putting this article second was a very important step because it connected to learning new things and the basics then having to revise them to get better. When choosing my last four articles it was a hard decision what order to put them in because they all had to do with how we learned in high school, what high school teachers tell us and who college is for/what they say about it. But after I thought about it for a while I figured out that I wanted to put Between the Drafts by Nancy Sommers in my third paragraph because she believes that if students arent taught all the basics correctly then they wont be able to write like scholars and the world would be uncontrollable. This is important because if students are not taught the correct basics then how are they supposed to revise their drafts properly. This is a very hard thing to do when you are not taught the basics. Professors feel like they failed the student when they cant teach the student all the basics and they feel like students must know the basics before they can do anything beyond that. Thats why Sommers argues Some colleagues fear that if we dont control what students learn, dont teach them to write as scholars write, we arent doing our job and some great red-legged scissor-man will cut off out thumbs (Sommers 450). I chose this article to be my third article because this is important to learn the basics just like authors do and min-zhan Lu did to be able to revise their writing.

Myers 3 After choosing the way I wanted to do all three of those articles there was a little bit of a shift on how I wanted to do the next three articles because they are not about the basics so much now. Now they are more about how college revision is, even if its not a draft there is revision about how youre shifting your life from high school into college. The fourth article I decided to use was what high school is written by Theodore Sizer. Taking subjects in a systemized, conveyer-belt way is what one does in high school (Sizer 267). The reason I chose to put this article in this paragraph was because when childrens parents went to school they werent required to take as many classes as children are now in schools. But some things that have stayed the same were English. Back in the day parents had to learn all the basics in school as said in the above paragraphs but thats not the main point of this paragraph. The main point is that children and parents both had to revise every draft they wrote in English. Thats why I thought that this was a good transitional paragraph between learning the basics and how transitioning into college is. Going into the second half of my thoughts I chose to use College isnt for everyone written by W.J. Reeves. This article from my perspective was chosen to have an audience about younger teenagers like coming right out of high school. Reeves wanted to teach students at a younger age to think more about their college and not to depend on their parents as much. Mainly because when students are coming straight out of high school at times and high school teachers are telling them that if they keep doing what they do now then they wont succeed to scare them. I chose this article and how I wrote it because