Process paper: APL:U1: AP Q1 Final Draft (9/28/18)

Click here first the first draft, final draft, rubric, and feedback

When I got my first draft in class, I was a bit discouraged at what I had received because during the assignment itself I felt confident putting the words down on the page. However, this rewrite was a fantastic opportunity for me to go over my mistakes carefully and see what I needed to improve on. I realized that I had made some pretty significant mistakes, such as completely missing the main message of both the poems (not realizing that Douglass and Milton were already dead and they were being idolized) and not looking closely enough at the poetic structures that both authors were implying. I thought the feedback I received on my first draft was quite accurate, which was that I wrote and expanded too much on points that were not as significant as I made them out to be. I had written far too much on a single topic, specifically how Wordsworth uses words like “fen” and “swamp” to describe the state of England. On the rewrite, I dramatically reduced the portion of the essay dedicated to the diction and chose to focus on style and tone a lot more, allowing me to talk broader and give a balanced analysis of both poems. As an example, I chose to write about how the styles of diction contributed to the tone of the poems and comparing the two poets based on that rather than fixating on the diction itself, which is quite shallow-minded. The rewrite opened my eyes to how much I missed on my first time. For example, it was difficult trying to incorporate elements of my first draft into the second because of how wrong it was. I believe that the rewrite is representative of the growth in poetry analysis I have experienced over the course of Unit 1 and I hope to expand on this knowledge more in the future.