Professional Documents
Culture Documents
may be the place where people you write about come alive. It will almost certainly (but not ALWAYS) be
in the exact middle of your first draft. What that location tells you is that you have to write the first half of
the first draft just to get to the thing you really want to talk about. The first half of the first draft is usually
just warm-up writing, just getting yourself in the mood. But you have to write that in order to get to your
middle.
Once you've identified your most memorable passage, you've also identified the topic (perhaps topic and
thesis) of your essay. Write another draft, focusing on your newly-discovered thesis and topic. Now you
are ready to shape your subject.
DEFINITION OF A THESIS STATEMENT: The thesis statement is that sentence or two in your text that
contains the focus of your essay and tells your reader what the essay is going to be about. Although it is
certainly possible to write a good essay without a thesis statement (many narrative essays, for example,
contain only an implied thesis statement), the lack of a thesis statement may well be a symptom of an
essay beset by a lack of focus. Many writers think of a thesis statement as an umbrella: everything that
you carry along in your essay has to fit under this umbrella, and if you try to take on packages that don't
fit, you will either have to get a bigger umbrella or something's going to get wet.
4. Compares the vicious cycle of homework load to the general structure of "vicious-cycle"
problems.
Or you can ask yourself how you got from point #1 to point #2 without explaining their connection; that
means you need to insert another paragraph between the two points.
Now that you've got these two revision methods, use them on all your future essays. You'll discover as
you go along that outlining after the first draft (and after other drafts, too) and listening for the most
memorable part of your first draft gets easier and easier. It's like learning to type; you'll just do it
automatically. And your later versions will be much, much stronger.
***NOTE: Let me remind you that revision is NOT recopying. REPEAT: I want to see a substantially
different (and improved) essay. Yes, improve the mechanics, but most importantly, improve the content
and structure of the essay. As you do so keep the past lessons in mind and let them inform the choices
you make. Are your sentences elegant? Are your descriptions detailed and vibrant? Is the voice
consistent? Does the essay as a whole feel cohesive and unified? If you simply recopy the essay or
change a few punctuation marks or alter a word here and there, I will consider this assignment to be
incomplete.***
REWRITE any essay you've written for this course, employing the techniques described above.
You should also take into consideration my critique comments. Make sure you have a title for the
revision (it can be different than the first draft).
INCLUDE a letter to me of at least 100 words that explains what you did in your revision and why
(and if you didnt want to use my critique comments, you should explain why here).
DON'T hold back from making big, bold, gutsy changes!