Projects: Portfolio Revisions

Revision is the most important part of the writing process, and that is why you will be spending two weeks revising for each week of writing (story-revise-revise, story-revise-revise, and so on). It's all about growth mindset: there are some things you cannot do as a writer... yet. If you focus on what is difficult for you as a writer and work on your problem areas, you will gain new writing skills that you can use in your next story, and in the writing you are doing for other classes too.

About the feedback. You will be getting feedback from other students in the class and from me too. You should make use of the feedback you receive, and hopefully you will get some specific feedback that will really help in the revision process. Remember: critical feedback and even negative feedback can be very useful. This is not about passing judgment on past work; instead, it is all about moving forward so that your revision can improve on what you started with, making the story better. 

About conflicting feedback. Between the comments you get from me, from other students in the class, and from anyone else who might read your writing (friends, family, Writing Center consultants, etc.), you will probably end up with a wide range of suggestions. You might even get conflicting suggestions; what each reader wants and what each reader needs might be very different. That is just one of the many challenges that you will face as a writer, and you can use the author's note to the story to tell your readers about some of the choices you made and why. 

Choose an editing challenge. During each week, you will choose at least one new Editing Challenge. Over the semester, you might want to repeat a challenge, but you should also try a new editing challenge each time. So, for example, if you worked on comma splices one week, you might need to keep working on comma splices the next week, while also adding on another challenge. There are always different approaches you can take to revising and editing a story, and if you have some ideas for additional challenges I can add to that list, let me know!

Revise the story. So, use the feedback you've received plus the challenge you have chosen to focus your revision efforts. If you have questions or run into problems as you work on your revision, send me an email and I will be glad to help. You'll also want to re-check the formatting, word count, do a spellcheck, etc. using the checklist in the form below.

FILL IN THE FORM and DO THE DECLARATION. To let me know the assignment is done, fill out the form below. Then, after you have submitted the form, you can do the Gradebook Declaration for the Project assignment in Canvas. I will send you back comments on your assignment by email.