So this week I was a little confused and turned in a revision of my Re-Purposing paper, instead of the Why I Write revision that was due. Luckily I’ll still be able to make revisions once the comments for that paper are returned, but I actually thought it was interesting what I found while revising my paper last weekend.
What I actually did for this paper was set it aside for a long time (I really hadn’t looked at it in depth since I turned it in) and then came back to it in order to do revisions. Now, I’m sure this is actually what many of you do for papers, especially since I remember my teachers since high school explaining what we should use this strategy to gain a fresh perspective on our own papers. However, I can honestly say that I’ve never done something like this. I always rush to revise and feel like it’s better to get everything done at once — which really isn’t that helpful the more I think about it. After going back last weekend and reading through the paper again, I found myself agreeing with some comments and having a clear enough mind to answer some of my questions that I had. I also found myself being a little to critical I felt at times, with different features like tone sounding good to me after some time away from the piece. I really couldn’t believe how much clearer my mind felt after not thinking about the essay for about a month!
I am really this late to the game? Is this a strategy that mostly everyone uses? I can’t believe that as a junior in college I am just now figuring out that this can be a really helpful tool for revision! I hope that in the future I can continue to keep this up and practice this skill in different ways with papers and assignments… it was a really interesting thing to learn as I revised this paper!