Revisions whoohoo!

Revising work that you've already done can sometimes be very disheartening because you have put lots of time into your finished product. Standing back and looking at the big picture as a whole really helps to see flaws and errors that you may have not noticed while treading through the trenches of writing down the material. Going back over the research may also raise questions that you feel need to be answered to give your reader a better understanding of the point that your trying to get across. In the reading Ballenger talks about a boy who writes an essay on how families deal with alcoholics within the family. The reader was apparently confused about the purpose of the paper stating that it seemed more about outsiders influence rather than the family members themselves (Ballenger). It is very easy to get sidetracked while trying to convey one message and accidentally putting to much information on another aspect of the topic. This is where revision comes in handy. You may even be able to keep some off-topic info as long as it is blended well with your main point. Sometimes within an essay you'll cover one point and three pages later have a paragraph that is associated with the first. By revising you can get everything placed where it needs to be correctly to make more sense. The idea Ballenger gives us to highlight research material one color and our own input another is a great tactic to make sure we are evenly dispersing our thoughts throughout the research to combine both views in an effective manner. It's a little scary thinking about discarding any of the work we've done, but in many instances it is probably necessary to make our draft more complete. I guess we'll see where the revisions take us, won't we.