Coming back to the Summary of a Secondary Source assignment was equal parts exciting and terrifying. This was definitely not my favorite work that I submitted, and I was definitely not looking forward to reading over what I had written only a few weeks ago.

     As per usual with my revisions, I initially focused on silly grammatical mistakes that I made, such as adding an apostrophe to the end of “its,” as well as yet another expletive construction! I also made a quick change to my works cited to ensure that it properly followed the rules of citation. Once i got those unsightly abominations out of the way, it was time to focus on the actual content of my submission.

     A problem I have always had in writing is being wordy, and this was no exception. Much of my revision went to polishing up sentence structure and trying to cut out unnecessary words. I have found from revision all of these different assignments that reading a sentence out loud is the best way for me to revise. If the sentence sounds awkward or makes me physically uncomfortable to speak, then it is definitely something that has to go!

     I think this assignment was very beneficial. Knowing how to summarize a source is very important, as the writing style is very different from writing an essay. In addition, you definitely do not want to plagiarize your source! My revisions certainly helped with the flow of the summary, and cut off many unnecessary bits that I do not tend to see until after I am done writing. I am hoping that all of this revision will allow me to avoid these mistakes the first time around!