I have to say that this was probably the most difficult paper I've had in a very long time.
For the past few years, I had reached what I thought was a vertical wall in my potential as a writer whenever I had English school assignments. Now I know that this is not the case. The wall was just really steep. Took me a while to notice this too.
Everything was going fine for my rough draft. I was used to it - this was a process that's almost automatic for me now. Write a complete draft for the first due date and make sure the essay has only the grammatical errors that I missed. You see, I was taught for 5 years to get rid of as many mistakes as possible before the rough draft is even finished. Now, after that amount of time, I do a lot of this in my head. Again, the first due date was easy for me: automatic.
Then I was thrown for a loop. At first, I had no idea what our teacher was talking about when she gave us our revision homework. As a matter of fact, I didn't even touch on that at all. I edited my rough draft. The reason? I, for a while and still sometimes, consider revision and editing to be the same thing.
I did both revision and editing at the same time and also mainly in my head... before I even wrote it down on the rough draft. I always thought they were the one and the same. Hence, the very confused student in the 2nd row for 3 days of class.
Finally, I started to understand what I needed to do. So I tried it. I took the most general idea that I had in my narrative and I took another experience I've had with it and wrote my second draft. Yet, I was so unsure that I couldn't even bring myself to finish that draft. Also, I do consider this the first time that I've ever really done this deep of revision. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.
Therefore, I went back into my comfort zone. My rough draft. After all, if you had the choice of comfort zone or shaky land, wouldn't you choose the same thing? This time I did more revision than I originally did on it.
I then reached another issue. My rough draft was already close to the page limit.
Oh, thank you previous teachers for giving me the experience of rewording sentences so that my paper always fits the page limit. Trust me, I had to do a lot of this and it's always very difficult to figure it out. You have to think one way and then do a complete 180 the next second. It gives you a real headache by the end of the process.
Anyways, I finally got room to add only a small amount of the revision that I wanted to add. But then, I reached the limit again and I couldn't even reword my sentences to get more room. So, all that revision that I finally figured out, I couldn't put a lot of my new material into it. I couldn't add what this identity searching for me was like during high school and what I found to help me through it. I could only add a small amount about my video game experience and then I was out of room! It was a real bummer.
I've learned a lot through this paper, mainly the difference between revision and editing, and it's going to be real helpful for future papers. Still, I did not enjoy how difficult this was. I also was dead set against the revision we had to do before grudgingly accepting it as neutral territory.... Doesn't mean that I ended up liking it. At. All.
I'm willing to bet that there's a fair amount of students out there that have always considered revision and editing as one and the same. This could really hold them back as it did me (it was a total of a week and half for me to finally get it) and really stress them if they didn't have a complete rough draft by the first due date. I think that for my generation, hope I'm right on this theory, we need some more explanation on the differences between revision and editing. Other than that, throw them to the sharks. They'll swim. They might not like it (like me) but they'll get it.
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