Looking back at my earlier work it is evident that I have learned how to better revise my early drafts. Prior to the course my revisions mostly consisted of local revision by looking at sentence structure, grammar, and spelling. With the help of this course, I have learned to not only make better local revisions but also global revisions. For example, my first draft for project 2 was very bare bones and was structured in a way that focused too much on my opinion with not enough evidence, “I also believe that we prioritize our wants and desire over the wants and desires of other living things. I think that is because we see ourselves as the top of the food chain, as the most intelligent species on the planet with the most complex emotions”. This information was more useful as a thesis because it talked about my reasoning and didn’t work well as supporting evidence. In my final draft I ended up using the ideas in this excerpt as a “payload” for one of my body paragraphs, “This is opposite of what Wallace argues about how he believes people are more selfish towards prioritizing their preferences over others. These two ways of thinking make up the two ends of a spectrum for the value of human’s vs animals”. I thought the ideas mentioned before fit better here in context because it allowed me to input my thinking in conversation with David Foster Wallace’s thinking.

Another skill I further practiced was local revision. In some instances, the ideas I was talking about were good, but the wording of the sentences did not portray my thinking. For example, looking back at my project 2 first draft my thesis, “I think that one’s preference to do things such as eating animals, buying products, or believing in the value of traditions/practice is valued greater than any other living thing’s preferences.” It was structured like a list which is how I was taught to make one in high school. Comparing this thesis to the one in my final draft it can be seen how much it improved, “These ideas lead me to believe that sufficient evidence is needed for the preferences of animals to be considered or else people would rather ignore them for their own selfish desires”. When I revised my thesis, I focused on straying away from the listing format which I was able to accomplish for my final draft. This revision shows how I was trying to move away from writing at a high school level and more into a college level.