Revision

I chose to revise my personal narrative mainly because I wrote it nearly a year ago and wanted to see how much it could improve. It was interesting to see how much I have grown as a writer by seeing my old writing styles and mistakes. My revision focuses were word choice and sentence fluency due to my struggles with those in the eighth grade. I noticed that I was using an extremely basic vocabulary and that many of my sentences confused me. Most of my paragraphs were written with little attention to how fluent the sentences were and I had to change up some of my wording.

Revision

Sentence Fluency and Word Choice

I originally wrote “. I cried every night for weeks and finally decided to get a new dog in order to help me forget about what had happened to Amber.” I decided to change it to “. I cried each night for weeks. I finally decided to get a new dog so I could forget about the life I lived with my old dog.” I felt like the sentence seemed to go on and on and while it was technically not a run-on sentence, it did not seem proper. I decided to split the sentence into two sentences to make the ending to the paragraph more fluent.

For my second revision, I chose to revise “Just above the soggy shoreline were pale gray storm clouds that petrified me.” Because one of my focuses is word choice, I felt like I had to change it. Instead I rephrased it, “Just above the soggy shoreline were pale gray storm clouds that set the mood of the events to come.” I feel like when I wrote this using vivid detail was new to me and I used harsh words such as petrified for dramatic effect. I decided that this was not the proper word choice because to this day, storm clouds have relaxed me and I do not understand what I thought when I wrote this. This is evidence as my growth as a writer throughout the year and it is entertaining to revise my old writing from over half a year ago.

For my third revision, I chose to revise the opening sentence of my concluding paragraph which is ,” This was one of the most memorable, but scary, experiences in my entire childhood.” I decided that saying “this” does not remind the reader about the events that took place and is too vague. I am working on improving my word choice and using the word “this” caught my eye because I would not do start my conclusion with this in any form of writing now. I decided to change this sentence to ,” The events mentioned made up one of the most memorable, yet scary, experiences in my entire childhood.” The sentence went much more smoothly after this change and feels less awkward now.

For my fourth and final revision, I have chosen to revise “I learned about death and aging, and that nothing in this universe will last forever.” This was the last sentence of my essay and I did not feel like it helped conclude it. I decided to change it to,” The loss of my first dog and the near loss of my second dog taught me life lessons about death, aging, and the fact that nothing in this universe will last forever.” It feels like a stronger closing sentence and is much less simple than what I wrote at first. I chose to revise the personal narrative assignment because it would show how much I have improved as a writer because of the amount of time between now and when I wrote this.