EXPOS-UA 4, “International Writing Workshop I” Radical Revision Radical Revision Portfolio (Essay Revision and Reflection)

Context : Each student will have the opportunity to revise and resubmit the P1 Close Reading Essay OR the P2 Reckoning Essay. The goal of this assignment is for you to substantially revise the essay in a major way. This will require that you do more work than fixing copy-editing errors or attending to a handful of my marginal comments. Indeed, this essay revision will require that you rework your essay; it will require that you reread—again—your primary and secondary sources, think critically about their purpose and meaning, and rewrite your draft.

There are many ways to approach this portfolio revision. First and foremost, you should think of your portfolio revisions as a project of “radical revision”—what Wendy Bishop defines as “an act of revision in which writers re-see their ideas through new perspectives.” This practice will require that you use the ideas generated in your original essay and recast them in various ways, producing a revised draft that comes out of the previous one. As Jeff Sommers notes, this will require you “not to produce an entirely different text that is only tangentially related to the first, which is not a revision at all” but instead “a recognizable version of the first paper that has been ‘radically’ changed.”

There are several processes that can help you to do this kind of work:

? Adding , or expanding the scope of the essay; ? Limiting , or narrowing the focus of the essay; ? Switching , or finding a new perspective or point-of-view for the essay; ? Transforming , or changing the narrative of the essay or remodeling the essay’s argument; ? Changing Emphasis , or rewriting the paper by making what was previously a minor point into a major

point, and/or selecting a different point or lens to frame your argument; ? Framing , or giving your essay a new beginning or ending; and ? Reorganizing , or reworking the organizational pattern for your representation, analysis, interpretation,

and argumentation.

Assignment : There are two required steps. To be able to submit a portfolio revision, you must complete all steps completely by the deadline:

1. Essay Revision (due Wednesday, December 16 @ 11:59 p.m. EST) Your essay revision should meet the requirements of the original assignment sheet. You will upload it to your individual student folder as a part of the “Radical Revision” subfolder. In addition to uploading your essay to the folder, you should upload the essay to NYU Classes in “Assignments.”

No extensions, except for documented family and medical emergencies, will be granted for this revision. In other words, if you submit a revised essay after Wednesday, December 16 @ 11:59 p.m. EST, it will not be regraded.

2. Revision Reflection (due Wednesday, December 16 @ 11:59 p.m. EST)

This reflective writing will be a meta-commentary on the new draft. In this reflection (1-2 well-developed paragraphs), added as either a “cover letter” or “addendum” to the revised essay you turn in, you will describe your revision practices: what choices you made in revising your essay; what your goals were in radically revising the draft; what realizations you made about your project, your writing practices, or the process of revision during this portfolio work; and what you gained from engaging in this project. While you can draw from the revision proposal, this must be a different document.

Grading : If you revise and resubmit the essay (following the guidelines for radical revision), the grade for the revised essay will be averaged with the grade of the original essay. (In other words, the revised essay grade will not replace the original grade.)