*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. *

For this paper, Professor did not leave many obvious revisions that I could have made. To start, I replaced the word “Utilize” with “Use” because utilize was an unnecessary word that creates an arrogant connotation. Professor also identified an obvious use of passive voice that I was able to fix. The passive sentence was made into the active sentence: “For each college, the handbook provides short descriptions of the curriculum, related activities, and specializations.”

After fixing the mistakes that Professor Hay’s highlighted, I reread my paper to develop a better understand of my paper.  Like my other revisions, I referred to Purdue Owl’s Hierarchy of concerns to address the rest of the revisions with my paper (Higher Ordered Concerns).  Addressing the Lower Ordered Concern first, I was able to locate and remove many expletives. This made my writing more concise. Sentences like “Therefore, there was no mention of graduate programs and facility organizations within the handbook” became “Therefore, the hand book did not mention graduate programs and facility organizations.” In addition to the passive voice error that Professor Hays highlighted, I changed “A short outline of the curriculum of the physical education course is also provided in this section” into “This section provided a short outline of the physical education course curriculum.” To make my writing more concise, I tried to remove all the words that were redundant and did not add meaning to the paper. I was inspired to do this by Vonnegut’s revision advice. Vonnegut stated that removing redundancy is a crucial part of the revision process. Keeping this in mind, I decided to remove a sentence about the physical education curriculum that repeats what previous sentence summarized. To address my Higher Ordered Concerns, I referenced the Banned Words Wiki. I replaced words like “various” and included more detail to address my development concern. I replaced the word various with “academic assistance and social guidance,” what I was specifically referring to.  As for the rest of the HOC’s, I felt that the paper had a strong thesis, purpose, and organization.

After finishing my revisions, I realized that this paper was an excellent choice for the first major paper. This paper exposed me to the proper construction of an argument. Not only did the Toulmin Analysis teach me how to analyze any argument/object, it also showed me how to properly construct an argument. By being able to identify the six parts of an argument, I am also much more conscious of including the six parts of an arguments in my paper. I later applied this skill during the construction of the Research Paper.  Since a semester has passed since I wrote this paper, I have grown as writer. I realized that this paper was fairly rushed. I feel that this paper could have been improved if I had dedicated more time towards it.  I was able to produce a much more refined revised draft because of the large time between the beginning of the semester and now.  I am quite satisfied with this final draft.

Citations:

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