Need a journal entry done.

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Xnl01

Humanities

Duke University

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Spend some time trying out the different revision strategies offered in this week's readings. You can do a reverse outline, experiment with the templates from They Say/I Say, or try some of the techniques listed in the webpages from UNC's writing center. Experiment with different methods and see which one is most productive as you revise. Then write a journal entry in which you tell me about the revising tools you used, the specific changes you made to your paper, and why you made those changes. 

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Outlining in Reverse By AARON HAMBURGER Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing. FROM: THE NEW YORK TIMES, JANUARY 21, 2013 In my experience, one of the surest ways to kill the creative energy of a work of fiction at its inception is with an outline. The very word takes me back to fourth-grade English class, with all those confusing Roman numerals and capital letters. During my early years as a writer I dutifully worked with the outlines of my youth. However, the longer I wrote, the more loose the structure of those outlines became. The numbers and letters gradually transformed into bulleted key words or bolded phrases, little Hansel and Gretel bread crumbs I left for myself to find and expand during revision. Later on, I wrote in stages, first blocking out the general parameters of my piece, then going back to fill in the details. It’s much the same way a figure sculptor begins by carving into a hunk of raw clay with broad strokes to determine the proportions of the limbs before going into muscles, veins and fingernails. Over the course of my 17-year writing career, I began to give up on outlining — that is, before I write. I’ve come to prefer a more organic approach to creation, first laying out my raw material on the page, then searching for possible patterns that might emerge. But now,after I’ve completed a first draft, I compose an outline. I’ve found that this is the surest way to make sense of the work. I originally thought I was a genius for having invented reverse outlining, but I’ve since learned that many writers do this in some form or another. I started using this technique while working on my first story collection. I knew that I tended to write long stories, but I had a hard time finding which parts of my material were superfluous. This was especially apparent during the immediate aftermath of the heat and light of creation. Every paragraph I wrote seemed not only relevant but also brilliant. For that reason, I relied on friends, fellow writers, even my agent, to help me locate the “flab” in my work. My inability to self-edit became an acute problem when I was invited to give a public reading and forced to stick to a time limit. Unfortunately, I’d exhausted my network of nonprofessional and professional editors with various drafts of my work. This was a puzzle I’d have to solve on my own. While staring at my stories for what seemed like the hundredth time, I decided to analyze them scene by scene, taking note of how many pages each one lasted, as well as how much of the piece was devoted to action and different characters. The math turned out to be inexorably honest. In some stories, I was embarrassed by how long I’d taken to set up my central conflict, as well as how little time I’d spent on some of the most crucial emotional moments. In other stories, I found that most of the scenes were roughly equal in length, and so cutting became as easy as an across-the-board budget cut. I dared myself to try to cut 10 percent from each scene, and then assessed what was left. Happily, I didn’t always achieve my goal — because let’s face it, writing is not math and never should be. Yet what I learned about my story along the way proved invaluable. While I worked on my novel, my outline took a slightly different form. The events in the book spanned a long weekend, Friday to Monday, so I created a plot calendar, noting which scenes and chapters took place on which day. I was shocked to discover that (a) half my novel was taking place on Friday night, and (b) I had skipped all of Saturday entirely, as if it had never happened. Of course, there might well be good reasons to make either of these choices, but only if they were made consciously, which these ones clearly had not been. Reverse outlining can even prove helpful in writing essays like this one. Introduction with hook: two paragraphs. Intro of main idea: one paragraph. Experience with story collection: four paragraphs. Experience with novel: one paragraph. Wow, didn’t realize I’d spent that much longer on the stories than on the novel until just now. As with any good tool, there is a limit to the use of reverse outlining and a danger of its abuse. Reducing a process as intuitive and sometimes emotional as writing to the objectivity of solving a mathematical equation isn’t always helpful or desirable. Why did I spend four paragraphs of this piece on my stories and only one on my novel? Well, because that’s what I had to say about each one. It felt right at the time, and the decision still feels right. I’m not going to add an extra paragraph or two about writing my novel just to even up the score, so to speak. And yet, given that writing is often such a subjective, emotionally driven process, I find it comforting when I stumble into areas of absolutes (relatively speaking), like grammar or punctuation. It’s nearly impossible to take a clearsighted view of your own work, since you’re reading not only the words that have fallen on the page but also adding to them the so-called brilliant ideas in your head, some of which never quite escape that lofty domain. When you don’t have a second pair of eyes nearby that can give you a sense of what you’ve done, sometimes it helps to trick yourself into seeing your work in a new light, by printing it out, changing your font, reading your work out loud. Or perhaps by trying a little math. Reverse Outlining from the Writing Studio at Duke University What is a reverse outline? Reverse outlining is the Swiss army knife of revising. Through this process, you can identify problems with your claims, the structure of your paper, and the organization of your paragraphs. We usually think of outlines as something we write before we write a paper—that is, if we write one at all. However, a reverse outline gets its name by being written after the paper it outlines. Whereas a regular outline is a tool to help organize your thoughts before you begin to compose, a reverse outline is a way of revealing how you organized your thoughts while you wrote. If you are concerned that your paper might not be saying what you think it is saying, that your main ideas aren’t really coming across, or that your paper might seem scattered or incoherent, a reverse outline is a great way to begin the revision process. How do I make a reverse outline? As you read through your essay, write the main thought or thoughts of each paragraph in order on a separate sheet or, alternatively, in the left margin next to the paragraph. In essence, you are trying to turn your essay into a list of bullet points, listing the point each paragraph is trying to deal with without getting into your argument or reasoning. Your final product should look something like this: Claim: Deinstitutionalizing mental patients in the late twentieth-century led to transforming the “hobo” to the “homeless person.” Paragraph 1: Introduction Paragraph 2: The image of the hobo before World War II Paragraph 3: The image of the homeless person today Paragraph 4: The effects of deinstitutionalization Paragraph 5: A history of deinstitutionalization Paragraph 6: A history of the depression; how the depression is both different and similar to the time period of deinstitutionalization; incorrect beliefs about the causes and timeframe of deinstitutionalization Paragraph 7: The Reagan administration’s policies on deinstitutionalization Paragraph 8: The realities of life as a “homeless person” contrasted to the romantic notions of “riding the rails.” Paragraph 9: Conclusion If you find yourself having problems summing up the main ideas of a paragraph in one or two sentences, you probably have too many ideas in that paragraph; try splitting it into two or more paragraphs. Alternately, sometimes summarizing a paragraph can be difficult because it contains too few ideas; if your paragraph has no unifying point, your summary of it won’t be able to articulate that point. In that case, reconsider why you included the paragraph in the first place. Now that I have a reverse outline, what do I do with it? Look carefully at your outline, considering both your organization and your main claim. Does each paragraph support your claim, or do you have one or two that contain extraneous information? Do your paragraphs seem to lead into each other, or are your ideas scattered throughout the paper? Looking at the example above, the first thing that comes to mind is that the summary of Paragraph 6 is significantly longer than the others. A closer look suggests this paragraph has too many ideas in it: why is “a history of the depression” in the same paragraph as “incorrect beliefs about the causes and timeframe of deinstitutionalization”? This paragraph should probably be broken up into two or even three separate paragraphs. Next, the organization of the paper seems a bit off. The paper begins with a discussion of “hobos,” but doesn’t return to it for at least four paragraphs, if not six. This paper would likely benefit from putting Paragraph 6 after either Paragraph 1 or Paragraph 3. Furthermore, Paragraphs 3 and 4 seem to be in the wrong place: since histories usually cause effects, one expects the order of these paragraphs to be reversed. Also, Paragraph 8 doesn’t seem to belong where it is now, but rather up with Paragraphs 2 and 3. Last but not least, consider whether these paragraphs support the main claim. Is there some dissonance between what is being claimed and what is being proven? In this example, the focus seems to be more on deinstitutionalization than on either hobos or the homeless; the writer might want to change either the emphases of the paragraphs or the main claim. In addition, Paragraph 7 has no place in the paper if the claim remains as it stands, unless the writer can relate the Reagan administration’s policies to this “transformation.” By reviewing your reverse outline, you should be able to identify major problem points with your claim, your evidence, or your organization, and you’ll have a place to begin your revision process.
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😀 Here is the journal entry. I based on the journal entry on using the reverse outline strategy in writing a social science paper this week. I hope to work with you again sometime.

Journal Entry on Revision
This week I experimented with several of the revision techniques introduced in this course, as well as
revision guidelines provided on the UNC website. The paper I was writing was an essay fo...


Anonymous
Really great stuff, couldn't ask for more.

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