Reflection over Thanksgiving break

Congratulations on all your hard work, especially in the last week. You deserved a breather and a some extra time to work on revising your last project for your portfolio. I encourage you to give yourself some space and time to really consider what you want to accomplish in the last project you choose to revise. Instead of trying to do it all in one day or finding a chunk of several hours to revise the project, try working on it over the course of a few days. In the following schedule, you work on the paper an hour or less each day, and focus on a specific task each time:

1. Day 1 (30 min.) Reread the project and the feedback you received on it. Then look at whatever revision plans you made, e.g. the crayon cluster or the sticky notes. Finally, write a note about the most important thing you want to accomplish and your target audience. 
2. Day 2 (30-60 min.) Look over your purpose/audience sentence and consider what else your paper needs to have to meet that goal. Do some research or reflection to fill that gap. Write up a few paragraphs about this information. If you added a new source, put it on your Works Cited.
   
3. Day 3 (30-60 min.) Reread the entire project, with the new information. Revise your Works Cited according to Purdue OWL guidelines. Revise your first couple of paragraphs to reflect your goals and the project's content.
4. Day 4 (30-60 min.) Reread the middle section of the project, making sure it transitions smoothly from one idea to the next and that all the ideas are related to your goals.
5. Day 5 Ask someone else to read the project for you, looking to see if your ideas are clear. Tell the person not to worry too much about mechanics yet. (This might be a friend or family member, or maybe a group member you reach via email.) Listen and take notes on the person's feedback.
   
6. Day 6 (60 min.) Reread the project with the new reader's comments in mind. Remember, you don't have to change anything, just consider what the other person said. Revise what you think needs to be changed.
7. Day 7 (30-60 min.) Proof the project (and maybe ask someone else to proof it too). Try reading it out loud to catch missing words or question spelling that you might miss when you read it silently.
   

Essentially, in revising the three projects you've selected for your portfolio, we've experimented with three time frames -- a few days to revise the first one, a weekend to revise the second, and now almost a week for the third. One of the things you might write about in your blog this week is how having different time frames affected the choices you made. Did you try spreading the revision over the week as described above? Or did you wait till the last day again? Does spreading out the revising improve your ideas and seem less stressful? Or do you prefer the pressure of the last-minute for getting your brain working? What seems to work best for you?