The paper above was written for my first year experience class. This class is meant to help us transition into college and learn more about ourselves. This paper is called “This I Believe” and is a popular prompt among students. The title is fairly self explanatory, you are to write about something that you believe in. When trying to write this paper, I had a really difficult time figuring out what I wanted to write about. To begin, I started to make an outline. Being in english class this year has taught me the importance to outline what I want to talk about and to make sure I get all of my ideas down. As I was finishing up writing my paper, I began to realize I was going in a completely different direction that I had originally thought. Without learning how to globally revise, my paper most likely would have been a mess. Before this class, I had never really paid much attention to global revision, instead I focused on local revision. Now I see how important this revision strategy really is and I plan to apply this to all of my writing in the future. Going along with global revision, I released how important it is to make drafts. In high school, I used to make one draft and pretty much be done. Now I realize how important it is to do more than one draft. To be honest, I feel like my papers could have improved even more if I had done more than two drafts. I found that eve just reading over my paper quickly allows me to find my weak points that I need to fix and also find the strong points that are focal points of my paper. Steven Pinker’s essay “Why Academics Stink at Writing” talks about wording in essays. “metadiscourse—verbiage about verbiage. Thoughtless writers think they’re doing the reader a favor by guiding her through the text with previews, summaries, and signposts. In reality, metadiscourse is there to help the writer, not the reader, since she has to put more work into understanding the signposts than she saves in seeing what they point to, like directions for a shortcut that take longer to figure out than the time the shortcut would save(5). I agree with Pinker that this can be a problem. I tend to find myself doing this a lot. Sometimes I feel like I am adding words just to add words. I think it is more important to focus on what you are writing about instead of going off to explain things that aren’t necessary.
