ENGL 110 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Lazy River, Infor, Reading Classic
Yexiao Gao 1435211
Writing Assignment
Internal and External Revision
Gao Yexiao
Donald Murray’s article discusses more than the separation of internal and external revision, but to-
day we will be using that dichotomy to examine our in-class drafts of paper #1.
We are NOT rewriting our paper 1 yet. First, we are going to evaluate what we have written and de-
scribe the ways it needs revision and the places that it doesn’t.
1. External Revision: Who is the audience for paper 1 and what does that audience want to see?
Consider the following:
a) Paper 1 asks you to describe your literacy history, not your experience of learning a new lan-
guage. Your instructor has given the class some general feedback that some students have
discussed language learning instead of literacy. Does that feedback apply to you?
I also felt confused about the experienced I talked about in this draft. Is the experiences
about my literacy history or it was just simply about learning a new language since I talked a
lot about how did I do to concur the difficulty of reading in a different language. I am nut
quite sure about deleting it or polishing it into my literacy history instead of simply talking
about what did I do to learn English. I would reconsider this experience seriously.
b) Your assignment asks you to describe one or two incidents from your literacy history. Do
you describe one or two incidents, or do you describe more? Or do you speak too generally,
so that your incidents are not particular moments with particular people but instead a sum-
mary of a time in your life?
Yes, I did write one incidents that described my literacy history and wrote about how did
those experiences help developing what kind and writer I am today. I speak specifically
about one particular incident at a certain time of my past, it is not a summary of whole liter-
acy history or literacy experiences I have when it comes to English.
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c) Do you “critically reflect on the significance of these experiences for your development as a
writer and/or thinker who has arrived today in this class (or at the U of A)”? Your instruc-
tor has told the class that this is the hardest part of the assignment. Do you talk about how
these incidents from the past affect your writing or thinking today?
I don’t think the first draft I wrote is be able to clearly reflect the significance of these expe-
riences for my development as a writer or thinker today. It should not be the problem of my
literacy experiences or the way I wrote or in other words, express it. It is just sometimes I
focused too much and pay too much attention on describing the details of those experiences.
I thought that writing and describing details of a certain experience or thing you want to talk
about is very important for the audience to interpret why do you want to talk about it or
how did those experiences influence you and help you to become a certain way in the future.
However, sometimes I can’t help myself to write too much details about an experiences and
I always tried to detail as possible as I can. Since excess is just as bad as deficiency, I think I
should focused on this particular problem I have in revising part of my paper 1
Also, I think I should focus more on what I can do to reveal the significance of theses expe-
riences through the the describing them in terms of structure, language and most im-
portantly, content.
d) Do you suggest or imply one or more reason that writing is important to you? “Suggest or
imply” means that the idea is there for your reader to find, but that you don’t tell me out-
right.
No I don’t think I successfully suggest or imply why reading and writing is important to me
though the draft of my paper 1. In the draft, I just simply talked about why I love reading
and how disappointed I felt after I started to read in a whole new language.
e) Does your paper match the genre? That is, does it read like a reflective narrative in the style
of Alexie, Malcolm X, or Keller, or does it look like a five-paragraph essay? Consider your
first paragraph: is it a summary of yourself and/or does it end with an overall idea? If so,
you might be writing a five-paragraph essay.
I don’t think the content I wrote will give readers a feeling that this is a five-paragraph essay.
First of all, I do not have a thesis statement that I need to focused on and talk about in the
next 4 paragraph. More importantly, the content of my first draft is not a summary nor it
ends with an overall idea, such as, how to read and write and how important read and write
are to me. In the first draft, I talked about, or tried to talk about how did those experiences
influenced me and how did them help to develop me to a thinker and writer I am today.
***This is the end of the portion that is due in-class today. Please post this to the WA6 forum.
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Donald murray"s article discusses more than the separation of internal and external revision, but to- day we will be using that dichotomy to examine our in-class drafts of paper #1. We are not rewriting our paper 1 yet. Consider the following: paper 1 asks you to describe your literacy history, not your experience of learning a new lan- guage. Your instructor has given the class some general feedback that some students have discussed language learning instead of literacy. I also felt confused about the experienced i talked about in this draft. Is the experiences about my literacy history or it was just simply about learning a new language since i talked a lot about how did i do to concur the difficulty of reading in a different language. I am nut quite sure about deleting it or polishing it into my literacy history instead of simply talking about what did i do to learn english.
