Learning Outcome 1

The writing project I chose to showcase is our assignment on metaphors. This was our first formal essay of the semester and I feel it demonstrates best my process of writing and revision. As we were taught, I start my writing process with a free draft, a dump of all of my ideas to be organized later. Because of this, I find that I keep a lot of my thought dumps in my final draft, so the revision may not seem like much at first glance. However, I do not include specific evidence in my drafts, or a real analysis of them. Instead I save that for revision as it allows me to take control of my essay and be the driver — the evidence should fit perfectly with what I am saying instead of my analysis being driven by the quotes I choose to support. For example, I used a quote from Geary’s TED Talk that showed how metaphors give deeper meaning to descriptions of people, Juliet from Romeo and Juliet being the example, but instead of adding what he says in my draft I first explain why it is relevant to my thesis and what I am arguing. Also missing from my initial drafts is proper formatting and a title, I choose to focus on the actual writing in my drafts and save technicalities for finishing touches. Since I have used this method throughout all of my essays, this shows that I like to have my writing consist of my opinions and thoughts, and I find only adding quotes to support and not to drive very important.