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Therie Montero
English 5
Jason Melton
May 16, 2016
Essay Revision
The score that I received on this paper is unknown to me and also the feedback that was
given. The paper asked me to write a detailed analysis of a book or play that we have read and I
chose the play A Dolls House by Henrik Ibsen. The paper ended up being a feminist analysis on
A Dolls House and focused the women and the role they played in the household and how that
changes throughout the play. To be quite honest, I was proud of this paper and thought that it
would receive a perfect grade because I really enjoyed reading a Dolls House. It was also the
longest paper I have ever written and the fact that I managed to make it five pages was quite
shocking to me. But I know that the grade I received was not perfect and there might have been
some mistakes that I overlooked. I wrote this essay during senior year of high school and I was
becoming lazy at that point, all I wanted to do was graduate and enjoy summer break. I believe
that senioritis is why I never thoroughly read my paper and why my analysis was general. I
would ask some of my friends to review my essay for me but they were all pretty stressed about
their paper as well. The grammar mistakes, lack of motivation, and lack of analysis were the
main flaws that led to the low grade that I received on this paper.
Due to my stubbornness which was paired with my laziness I never thoroughly looked
over my paper to check for any grammar or spelling mistakes. This essay was created with the
utmost confident hope that spell check would have my back and that it would correct any
mistakes that might have occurred in the paper, but I was wrong. As I read this paper, I noticed
that there is a lot of awkward wording and simple grammar mistakes that were overlooked. The

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awkward wording was only due to the fact that I was not an expert at what I was writing and
simply could not find the right word to place in some certain sentences. It was also the first and
only draft that I wrote for this essay which I also eventually turned in, and the writer of Shitty
First Drafts, Lamott, states, Not one of them [great writers] writes elegant first drafts (Lamott
21-22). This article showed me that no one's first draft is perfect and that it's just a stepping stone
for writing the actual essay. The grammar could also be caused by the fact that I finished the
essay at 2 am in the morning the day the paper was due.
Essays are extremely tedious for me because they take so long to create and the prompt
are almost never interesting enough, so I put off the essay for as long as possible. When I
received the prompt for this paper it was four weeks until it was due and just placed it in the back
of my mind. During this time, I was a senior at high school and there were a lot of things that I
needed to do that I was also procrastinating on. I had a lot of work and too much time to not do
it. By week two of having been given the say, I started to do the bare minimum and wrote an
outline. The outline was mandatory and needed to be turned in so I worked really hard on it. The
outline basically contained the whole essay but it needed to be more polished. The day before the
essay was due, I typed out the essay and gave it to a friend for peer review. Richard Straub, the
writer of Really- Really Responding- to Other Students Writing, said Even When youre
tough and demanding you can still be supportive (Straub 165). I agree with this completely
because I would want a peer review to show me the strengths and weaknesses of my work. Peer
review also gave me a new and different perspective to my paper and that helped understand
what readers might think of the paper I wrote. The results of the peer review were a lot of
criticism and writing as well as some helpful advice on what to add. The paper lacked good
analysis and I only had one night to fix the whole paper. But of course I pushed revising my
essay to the very last minute because my favorite show was on that same night and I idiotically

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placed it as my top priority. I procrastinate when a certain assignment does not interest me and I
believe that I can always put it off until later. Due to this constant amount of procrastination, I
start to think that the work I do under pressure is better than the one I would have given more of
an effort towards. This level of procrastination is profoundly stressful but during that time the
pressure was exactly what I needed to finish the essay on time.
The essay itself had enough quotes from the book that we read but lacked well explained
analysis. My analysis for the quote was short and contained no critical thinking. All of my
analysis barely scratched the surface of what the quote truly meant and was more of an in depth
summary of that quote. Some quotes also had the same meaning which made that statement
redundant. The essay is a feminist analysis on Henrik Ibsens play A Dolls House.
Unteaching the Five Paragraph Essay Writer, Marie Foley, writes that, As soon as students
meet their quota of three body paragraphs, they are free to stop thinking about their topic (Foley
231-232). I agreed with Foley knowing from my past experiences that the five paragraph
structure was more of an organization tool rather than being used for critical thinking. I wrote the
essay using the five paragraph structure which limited my thought process once I found the three
quotes that I would be analyzing. The writers block that I experienced kept me from fully
expressing my opinion about the quotes that I chose. The lack of words that had occurred to me
back then makes me frustrated to this day.
If I could rewrite this essay once more I would make sure all the grammar and spelling
were correct, I would not procrastinate and I would give a more in depth analysis. Although this
essay was not perfect, it was the best that I could do given the circumstances that I created for
myself. This paper made me realize that the mistakes I made on this essay would occur on other
essays and that I need to change these habits of only doing one draft and procrastinating. To

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become a better writer, I should be able to find a topic that would pique my interests and realize
that writing can become a long process that may need to be revised over and over again.

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Works Cited
Foley, Marie. Unteaching the Five-Paragraph Essay. Teaching English in the Two-Year
College 16.4 (1989): 231-35.
Lamott, Ann. Shitty First Drafts. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New
York:\ Pantheon, 1994. 21-27.
Straub, Richard. Responding- Really Responding- to Other Students Writing. The Subject is
Writing: Essays by Teachers and Students. Ed. Wendy Bishop. 3rd ed. Portsmouth, NH:
Boyton/Cook-Heinemann, 2003. 162-72.