journal 8

            When looking back at my rough draft, getting ready to edit it was very overwhelming. In high school I was definitely a one and done person; not because I wanted to be, but because we never really gave editing and revising the time of day. It never appeared as being important in my english classes, and most of the time we would just brush them aside. I was never a huge procrastinator so I usually went back and would reread them out loud to make sure they sounded okay, but looking back at it now, that truly wasn’t enough. The ideas are usually there, but it is the concept of putting them into words that flow and mesh well together that I struggle with. That was one big thing I spent a lot of time working on with this piece. I had a lot of choppy sentences that I had to go back to and reword to figure out a new way that sounded best. I think that having multiple people read my essay was very beneficial. It was no longer just me reading it and this allowed for many great critiques to be made. I know how I want my essay to sound so when I’m reading it I read it the way I want it to be heard, but once it’s in the hands of other people I found that a lot of the things I said were either repeated or no longer sounding fluent. The feedback opened my eyes to different way in which I could word things and allowed me to realize that my ideas were all there, but the word choice could be spruced up here and there. When approaching this, I had a very open mind because my go to is not writing a narrative, especially about food. On top of this, I didn’t know how truly important, beneficial, and time-consuming revising and essay actually is. I enjoyed doing it and giving feedback to other people was a new outlook, and this whole experience definitely opened my eyes up to so many new ideas and concepts.