When I first hear the word “revision”, it means going over the materials from the course and making sure that you understand. However, I think that revision is a process and if you do not understand something, you need to ask either your friends or professors, because the aim is for you to grasp all the knowledge and information. For example, when I was in high school, I took IB(International Baccalaureate) and I had to take six classes: Business Management Standard Level(SL), Chemistry Higher Level(HL), Economics HL, English B HL, Japanese A SL, and Mathematics SL. My exams were in May and I started revising from around January. The first thing I did was to look over the worksheets and notes, which was very helpful since it clearly showed what I understood and what I didn’t. After that, I turned to textbooks and started reading the chapters and solving the problems. Then, I went to the teachers to get some help on the questions that I didn’t understand or I didn’t know. However, this is not the end of revision, because in order to fully understand the materials, I had to start the process from the beginning. Meaning that I looked over the notes and worksheets again, read through textbooks, and solved the questions. By repeating this process, I was able to gain more knowledge, information and trends of the questions.
Comparing to “revision” for tests and exams, “revision” for writing is a little bit different.In terms of writing, revising is a process of writing a good story or an essay. Even though I said that revision for tests and writing is a little bit different, I personally think that they revision for exams and for writing is essentially the same thing, or at least very similar. This is because repetition is the key for both process. What I mean by this is that you need to repeat three things over and over again,which are read, write, and edit. For example, if you are doing a research paper, you need to do your research, write your essay, and edit. After you finish a round of that, you have to go back and start reading the essay, write more, and edit again. By using this system, you can improve the quality of your essay.
According to Perl’s study, “[t]he most salient feature of Tony’s composing process was its recursiveness. Tony rarely produced a sentence without stopping to reread either a part or the whole. This repetition set up a particular kind of composing rhythm, one that was cumulative in nature and that set ideas in motion by its very repetitiveness” (Perl, The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers, P324). Despite her opinion, I strongly believe that the important thing here is recursiveness. As I mentioned earlier, by repeating the process you are essentially revising your own work, leading you to produce better essays.
Also, I can relate to Meaghan’s video where she talks about how she writes essays. As she mentioned, there should be a system when you write essays. For example, outline your essay, summarize the sources, writing paragraph by paragraph and relate back to your thesis. By writing your first draft, you have an idea of how you want to write and convey your message. However, first draft tends to be messy and not well written, meaning that you need to keep editing to write better ones. This could be your second draft, third draft, or even tenth draft, but by revising your essay over and over again, you can write your best essay.
Yu's English Project 