essay

When an author writes a piece of work, they go through several drafts before they feel that their work is complete enough to be published. This process of rereading, rewriting, and reediting is known as revisions. Professional authors can do a large amount of revisions; some authors do as many as 150 revisions (Murray 327). Throughout my writing career in school, I have only done two drafts: the rough and final draft. As I have continued my studies in school, revisions have become more important, and will only better myself for my future schooling and career. One of the biggest struggles I have been conflicted with as a writer is grammar. I tend to misuse commas a lot, which on my essays were labeled “comma splices.” In the first few essays that I wrote, I had a few of these comma splices. For example in my summary essay I wrote,

“Julie spent two years in Indonesia studying and performing, she had become one of the family in the village where she stayed.” That comma should not have been put there. I had the same comma splice problem in my critique essay. I wrote, “She partook in an experimental problem that only made her condition worse, her mental status was declining, which was the final straw in her book.” The first comma in that sentence should have been included. My rhetorical analysis essay seemed to have the most comma splices. “Nothing stands out when you look at this website, that makes it difficult for readers to focus on the material,” I wrote this, and the comma

Deskin 1 is unnecessary. I’m noticing that I like to use commas, but I don’t use them correctly. I tend to use the “pause” rule, which is when someone reads a sentence and they pause at a certain point within that sentence. It just seems r...

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...then I can rephrase the sentences to incorporate more of my voice throughout my essay.

Development is another process of revision that Murray discussed in his article. Murray states, “each section of a piece of writing must be adequately developed” (Murray 328). The thing that I struggle most with as a college student is procrastination. Especially with working on top of going to school, I tend to put off my assignments until the night before an assignment is due. I did start early with this assignment, but not as early as I needed to. My development was weak in the perspective that I did not know where I was going with my paper. I discussed the history of same-sex marriage, then I moved to the argument portion of the essay. If I did a revision on this essay, I think I would try to start from scratch and write out an outline to help develop my essay more.