First I completed some things that weren’t finished in my first draft. A significant addition were the quotes by Margaret Atwood from Lady Oracle, which I hadn’t had on hand when I wrote the first draft. I think that the addition of quotes from her really worked well with the essay as a whole, it had really been missing that. My Walt Whitman quote explained why I liked to write, but the Atwood quotes described why I liked to read and, by extension, why I think readers would like my work. I restructured the essay a bit thanks to the feedback I got from a reviewer. I changed the paragraph breaks and moved a few sentences around because the original organization wasn’t the best.
The bulk of my revision on this piece was concerned with changing specific words and phrases. In some cases the previous phrase had been awkward or misleading, but a much bigger problem was repetition. When I write an entire essay on one subject I usually have to repeat sentiments to make more and more points about them. So I tried to change up the language and come up with ways to rephrase things that I repeated throughout my essay. For example I had added some more detail in the part describing how children acquire self-awareness, but I had used “recognize” too many times. It wasn’t just a simple matter of replacing “recognize” with a different word, however, and I ended up changing phrases and entire sentences to make it sound professional and polished.
Sending Out Sunrise 