Empoword

Appendix A: Concepts and Strategies for Revision 462 Global Revision Activity for a Narrative Essay This assignment challenges you to try new approaches to a draft you’ve already written. Although you will be “rewriting” in this exercise, you are not abandoning your earlier draft: this exercise is generative, meaning it is designed to help you produce new details, ideas, or surprising bits of language that you might integrate into your project. First, choose a part of your draft that (a) you really like but think could be better, or (b) just isn’t working for you. This excerpt should be no fewer than 100 words and can include your entire essay, if you want. Then, complete your choice of one prompt from the list below: apply the instruction to the excerpt to create new content. Read over your original once, but do not refer back to it after you start writing. Your goal here is to deviate from the first version, not reproduce it. The idea here is to produce something new about your topic through constraint; you are reimagining your excerpt on a global scale. After completing one prompt, go back to the original and try at least one more, or apply a different prompt to your new work. 1. Change genres: For example, if your excerpt is written in typical essay form, try writing it as poetry, or dialogue from a play/movie, or a radio advertisement. 2. Zoom in: Focus on one image, color, idea, or word from your excerpt and zoom way in. Meditate on this one thing with as much detail as possible. 3. Zoom out: Step back from the excerpt and contextualize it with background information, concurrent events, information about relationship or feelings. 4. Change point-of-view: Try a new vantage point for your story by changing pronouns and perspective. For instance, if your excerpt is in first-person (I/me), switch to second- (you) or third-person (he/she/they). 5. Change setting: Resituate your excerpt in a different place, or time. 6. Change your audience: Rewrite the excerpt anticipating the expectations of a different reader than you first intended. For example, if the original excerpt is in the same speaking voice you would use with your friends, write as if your strictest teacher or the president or your grandmother is reading it. If you’ve written in an “academic” voice, try writing for your closest friend—use slang, swear words, casual language, whatever. 7. Add another voice: Instead of just the speaker of the essay narrating, add a listener. This listener can agree, disagree, question, heckle, sympathize, apologize, or respond in any other way you can imagine. (See “the nay-sayer’s voice” in Chapter Nine.) 8. Change timeline (narrative sequence): Instead of moving chronologically forward, rearrange the events to bounce around.