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Lacy Kitchin Ms. Jessica Camargo English 2100 5 April 2013 For my visit to the Writing Center, I chose to work on revisions of my first essay. I had a lot of trouble with the assignment. I thought poetry explications were not very difficult, until I had to put everything in to an essay. Prior to this assignment, I was very comfortable with APA formatting. MLA formatting was very different and I needed lot of help with formatting issues. The essay had a lot of structural issues. It was not laid out as logically as it could have been, and I needed to condense large portions of the essay into a few sentences. The first thing we focused on was the overall structure and organization of the paper. Instead of organizing by stanza or line, we started to reorganize it by literary device. I decided to limit my focus to imagery and personification. I wanted to include metaphors but there wasnt enough to work with in the poem. Next, we went through and condensed the essay as much as possible. This was the most difficult part for me because I had certain portions of my essay that I really loved. I did not want to remove these parts, even though my feedback from the first draft stated I had too much explanation. My tutor was not as helpful with this part of the essay as some of the others. She agreed that there were parts of the essay that would be difficult to remove. We both liked the portion that stated: Childhood is equally, if not more, spectacular and short-lived. Life seems to be very long to children, but only in adulthood does one realize how fleeting life really is. Life should be enjoyed while it lasts. Life should and can be lived with the joy and

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exuberance of a child, if one can effectively shed the boring details of adulthood.(2) We gave up trying to remove this portion of the essay, and I eventually found a way to work it in. The first draft of my essay should have made more use of the oreo method, so we spent the last 5-10 minutes discussing ways to incorporate this into my writing. Since I am a visual person, my tutor suggested that I use post-it notes to help me through this process. She suggested that I write down one literary device or idea I wanted to express with a brief idea about how I wanted to express it. The rule was it had to fit on the note. Then, I should take a new note and write the quote that represents that literary device. On a final note, I was to write additional supporting evidence for the quote. This method was beneficial to me for revising this essay, as well as in a number of other assignments. I thought the visit was helpful, although not as helpful as I had hoped. Neither of us could figure out how to condense the necessary parts of the essay without falling short of the required word count. I do feel that the Writing Resource Center is a very useful tool, and I would definitely return in the future.

Resources Kitchin, L. Where Children Live: Growing up is a State of Mind. 2013.