Revision

Revision is something that is necessary for all writing. My eighth grade English teacher used to say, "Writing is not done, it's due". Even though I may not have revised every essay I have done, I definitely did for this class. Here is a paragraph that I worked on revising during my Analysis unit essay on Slumdog Millionaire.

The First Draft:

This is the first draft of my paragraph for the Analysis essay. The first and second sentences were fine, in my opinion, so I left them in there. The third sentence was where I decided to make some changes. Instead of just jumping in to the fact that Jamal's story is told through a series of flashbacks, I decided to give a little more background information about why he was even in interrogation in the first place. To do this I used a quote from the police inspector to tell the reader why Jamal was there, which can be seen in the next draft. I did not cut the sentence that begins with "His story..." out of the essay, but instead moved it to a different part of the paragraph, which can also be seen in the next draft. Finally, I decided to cut the last two sentences from the paragraph because I felt that they were unnecessary to the essay's development. My peer reviewer clued me in to this, but in the end it was my decision to take out both sentences and rework the paragraph.

The Second Draft:

Here is the second draft of my paragraph for this essay. As you can see, I added a couple of sentences after the sentence that ends with, "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" These two sentences provided much more important background information to my essay than the two sentences that were in my other draft, where I was talking about what book the movie was based on and what influenced it. These two sentences told the reader why Jamal was being interrogated and allowed the essay to move on very quickly.

The problem with the essay now was that I had never introduced an important outside source that the ideas of my essay were based on, which was Diana George. Fortunately, this was the perfect place to put a new paragraph that outlined those ideas, which shows up in my final essay.

The Final Draft:

This is the final draft of my essay. The addition of the paragraph about Diana George's ides really helped my essay get off the ground. It provided the groundwork for the rest of my essay and helped me to evolve my thesis and and analyze the idea of the deserving poor and undeserving poor, which was the main point in my essay.

The paragraph was intended to be an introductory type of paragraph. It was not intended to help me to prove my point in the essay, but to show where my ideas were coming from and where they originated. I used a quote from her essay in the paragraph as supporting evidence of her belief in this idea, and then had a couple sentences around the quote just reinforcing the idea that the poor are classified into the categories of deserving and undeserving. Then I transitioned into the next paragraph and continued with my essay.

Revision is something that is essential to all essay writing. A revised essay will be better than an essay that has not been revised nearly all of the time. I know that this essay would most definitely not be what it is without the revision that took place throughout the three drafts it took to get it to where it is right now.