Essay revisions

1. ENGL 102 – 01
Summer 2019
Essay Revision Plan Guidelines
If you have earned a 7 on your essay and would like to revise it for the opportunity to earn
an 8 (B), you must first turn in a revision plan. The purpose of a revision plan is to assist
you with re-visiting your work, thinking through what you’re trying to accomplish, working
through my comments/feedback, and seeing where adjustments can be made to strengthen
your writing. Rather than only looking at my comments and racing through to “fix” your
essay, you can decide what changes are the most important for your essay, prioritize them,
and approach them in the order you deem fit.
Remember that “revision” is not editing. We are not simply “proofreading” or “correcting”
our work. We are working on skills that will help us grow as writers. Editing should be the
final act of an essay: the last thing you should do is check for spelling/grammar mistakes.
While some of you may have earned an “unsatisfactory” in a category that focuses on your
conventions, that is not the sole reason you are here, and you should take that in to account
while prioritizing your revisions. Please be specific about the tasks you need to complete.
Your essay will not be reevaluated if a revision plan is not turned in. Your revision
plan must meet the following criteria:
• Introduce what essay you are making a revision plan for and what specific
requirements on the project guidelines you did not meet (you must discuss these
specifically)
• For each requirement you did not meet, you must state and explain exactly what you
need to work on/do to change that.
• Prioritize these (they do not need to be in the order they are on the sheet)
• Type and upload to the Revision Plans drop box by the assigned date
*The drop box for all revision plans can be found in the Essay Revisions folder.
Examples of good and bad revision plans:
Here is a bad revision plan:
1. Revise my thesis
2. Develop my solution
3. Add more examples
4. Correct my citations
5. Cut out some unneeded material
Here is a good revision plan:
This revision plan is for my argumentative essay on recycling. I earned an unsatisfactory in
the following categories: thesis, solution, support (examples), citations, excess information,

2. and conventions. I have looked over these categories and my feedback and come up with
the following revision plan:
1. Revise my thesis: Right now, my thesis argues an issue, that not recycling is
immoral. Since this is a proposal, I need to make the topic a problem to be solved
rather than an issue to be argued. Here’s what I’m thinking: “In order to solve the
problem of consumer waste, consumers should be given incentives to recycle…”
2. My solution is clear, “Consumers need to be given incentives like tax breaks,” but the
details need work. How can I make this solution happen? How ca legislators be
convinced? What kind of tax breaks am I talking about? How would the breaks be
applied?
3. I need to give more examples of how the problem has been solved in the past and
failed. I admit I need more focused research on the history of the problem. Some
resources I might consult this time around are…
4. My in-text citations seem to include years of publication, which aren’t needed, and I
need to remove author’s last names from citation markers if I have the author’s
names in the signal phrases, and then put the article titles in the citation markers
instead. I also need to set off a couple of long quotes (of more than four lines).
Beyond following convention, these kinds of changes will help my argument
because…
5. I have a whole section after the problem that repeats a lot of the information in the
intro. It defines the problem more as the conclusion of the essay, but I already
defined the problem, so I think I can cut most of this material. I was just padding
space to meet the page count requirement, but I’ll meet the requirements by adding
in good, purposeful information to develop the solution by adding more details to
my solution and giving more examples…