Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Sommers

In Sommers' article, she explains a lot about her childhood early on in the writing and thoroughly got me to feel strongly about her views in doing so. By bringing up her past, I felt a strong sense of her attempting successfully at building pathos. She ties the pathos into her full writing and moves from her past hardships to how she feels every single writer should become fully involved with their paper and care passionately about it. They should be your thoughts completely and you shouldn't have to accept others opinions and beliefs into it. Sommers mentions in her writing about taking a break from your writing and taking a, "hot shower." This context refers to taking a break to freshen up on your writing. Simply because, your revisions of a paper should feel like a full on study of the topic again. You should go into as much detail as possible redefining each and every point so you take nearly, or maybe even more, time on the revisions as you did when planning out and writing the paper in the first place. I have had teachers in the past in which did not allow me to revise papers because they didn't believe in extra credit. I disagree because with revision, I feel a larger appreciation and understanding of my paper than if I were to just crank out a paper in a one night outing at the library and forget about it entirely. I think that revisions are a great thing and should be permitted to be practiced by everyone. I think that with revisions, as agreed with Sommers, you put your own thought and feelings into the paper other than what others opinions are on the matter. We need to move on from just copying what other wrote and be original with our work; put our own thoughts into our work: who knows, if everyone decided to do this and merely not revise the grammatical errors, but look back and pour their own minds into it, maybe papers will become more interesting to read.

4 comments:

  1. Reading this article really gave me a new perspective on revision. I had always thought that revision simply meant fixing the grammar. I like how the author explains that this is the common view of revision; however, it is not the best one. I agree with your opinion that revision is vital to learning about writing and that it should be permitted and encouraged.

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  2. I agree that currently, the problem with revision is the fact that students think that revising a paper means swapping around their grammar. But, after reading this piece, the author explains that we need to put our own thoughts and feelings into our papers rather than words that may not have anything to do with how we really feel on the matter. You did a good job at pointing this out. Otherwise, I would not have noticed it as well when reading Sommers article.

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  3. I wish more teachers promoted revision. How can you ever learn from your mistakes if you are never allowed to correct them?? I'm sure papers would be so much more interesting to read if students made their writing more original.

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  4. I agree with you. I haven't even begun revising my papers yet but I already feel more deeply connected with them than I have any paper I cranked out one long night at the library. I feel like I've already been thinking about these papers and multiple perspectives and how to best mold each transition together a lot. Taking a break between the papers really helped to gain a new appreciation for what I was writing about and now as I go back to my paper I can change my ideas so they belong to me more than the person I quoted in paragraph two.

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