*The first thing I did for all my drafts was consider what Professor Hays wrote. I felt that Professor Hays was the most direct source of insight for this revision task. Therefore, I always attempted to fix mistakes mentioned by Professor Hays before I tried to revise the assignment on my own. *

I started my revision by fixing the punctuation mistakes that Professor Hays highlighted. In this paper, I misplaced a comma outside a set of parenthesis and used single quotations marks instead of double quotation marks for a quote. Next, I revised the general mistakes that I made. Professor Hays noted that I used the word roll instead of role. In addition, I switched “Howard” with “White” so that the paper addressed Howard White by his last name instead of his first name. The last of the revisions that Professor Hays suggested required development of my paper. I altered the phrase “self-rule” to “self-discipline” because I felt that this phrase more accurately expressed my original idea. I also expanded on the idea of respecting the opinions and values of others found in the second paragraph. I included a qualifier to my previous statement. From the Toulmin Analysis, I learned that this qualifying statement made my argument stronger.

After I fixed what Professor Hays mentioned, I reread my paper once again to gain a renewed understanding of my paper. Going beyond what Professor Hays wrote, I used Purdue Owl’s Hierarchy of Concerns to further enhance my paper (Higher Order Concerns). I first addressed the lower order concerns by fixing the voice of my paper. I converted several passive voice sentences to active voice by altering the verbs. The Higher Order Concerns was not a large issue in this paper. My thesis, purpose, and organization were well constructed in this paper. I revised the development of my paper by adding an additional detail. I included an idea about perspective into the third paragraph because I felt inspired by one of Professor Hay’s lectures that exposed the different perspectives of art.  Not only did the idea of perspective help me synthesize my sources during the research unit, it strengthened the essence of my argument.

Since the beginning of the semester, I felt I’ve learned much more about grammar, being concise, and the Toulmin analysis. I feel that I am able to create much stronger arguments because I’ve learned how to analyze arguments. Being able to analyze arguments gives me a better perspective on what traits make arguments stronger. I’ve also noticed that I used to have wordy sentences. These sentence made my ideas confusing for the reader and were redundant. Even though I made many mistakes, the original paper helped me become accustom to the process of writing and expressing ideas in words.

Citations:

“Higher Order Concerns (HOCs) and Lower Order Concerns                                   (LOCs).” Purdue Owl Online Writing Lab. Purdue Owl, 01 Mar.                   2013. Web. 02 Dec. 2015.