TASK: Your job is to perform a substantial revision of one of your first three major writing assignments, using your classmates’ feedback and the rhetorical concepts you have learned so far as guides to enhance your writing. Your ultimate goal is to make your revision into the absolute best piece of writing you can manage. This revision should be closer to achieving its goals and engaging its readers than anything else you have written this semester.
To complete this assignment, you will need first to select the major writing assignment that you will revise. Then, you will give and receive peer review feedback in this unit’s Peer Review assignment. Your classmates’ responses to your work should be your starting place. If they have done a good job, your classmates will give you plenty to work with! You should also use all relevant feedback from your instructor as a guide to revision.
This assignment requires significant revision. That means that it will not be enough to simply edit your punctuation, run spellcheck, add a quotation or two, and come up with a new title. So, if you aren’t simply editing your prose, what should you be doing in revision?
This is where the rhetorical concepts that you’ve learned in class so far will help. Let’s recap. You have learned about:
The rhetorical triangle: writer, audience, and subject
Connections between genre and social context
Making arguments using claims