Ability to Revise

I am working to achieve the goal of approaching writing as a recursive process by writing with the mindset that my first draft is not my final draft. When writing the first draft for the first paper for English 110, Emerging Adulthood as a Life Stage, I was weary and unsure about changing things. After having it peer edited and talking about ways to change the organization in class I became more comfortable with making global changes to my first draft. Peer editing also helped me learn how to make the claims of my paragraphs more clear. Instead of starting off my second paragraph with a quote “According to Robin Henig’s essay, What is it about 20-somethings?, emerging adulthood is a period of ‘identity exploration … ‘” I revised it to start by saying “Emerging adulthood is a period of “instability” which gives young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five a chance to find themselves and their purpose.” By changing the first sentence I was able to make the topic of the paragraph more clear. After this first essay prompt I was able to go about the process for writing my second essay prompt a little differently. Before actually writing a rough draft on the computer I wrote down different ideas from each text we were told to use and connected them to see how I wanted to my make claim for the prompt. After that I outlined the ideas for my essay by coming up with a topic sentence then listing the claims I wanted to make and the evidence I planned to use to support those claims and writing a few sentences for what I wanted to talk about in my conclusion. Then I went back to my thesis statement to make sure it fit the claims in a specific way.