Julia R. Smith
The repurposing project required us to take something we had already written and rewrite it for a new audience. As we worked through the project, we constantly had to think about our argument and how it would appeal to our audience. I wrote my original piece for an English class in 9th grade. The prompt was based off of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and asked us what five books we would save if we were living in the world of Fahrenheit 451. When I went back and read this essay five years later, I was shocked to discover how drastically my taste in books had changed. (I won't go into detail, but the entire essay is accesible by clicking the "Origianl Piece" button to the right). I decided to write a new piece from the opposite perspective: I wanted to save controversial books.
This proved way more difficult than I anticipated, and throughout the drafting process, my project changed drastically. This page takes you through that process. Each consequent draft is available by clicking on the buttons to the right and includes an author's note contextualizing the piece and explaining my thoughts about it at the top, as well as self-reflective comments that point out what I thought needed more work in each particular stage. My analysis of the drafting process follows below:
1. As always, in my first draft, I concentrated on just getting all of my thoughts down on the page, in whatever form they took. Halfway through the draft, however, I stopped. Even for a first draft, my writing was becoming too unweildy to continue. I had only covered one book and my essay was already multiple pages long. I needed to narrow my topic and specify my argument.
2. In my second draft, I decided to just focus on Nabokov and, more specifically, the books Lolita and Ada. It soon became apparent, however, that my argument was still unclear. My essay contained a lot of rambling and not a lot of substance.
3. Between drafts 2 and 3, I took a long break and really thought about my audience and what I wanted my specific argument to be. I decided to cater to college-aged students who were on the fence about reading Nabokov because of his books' reputations, and I imagined my piece being published in a college literary magazine. This allowed me to really hone in on my argument.
4. Although I worked hard to solidify my argument and cut out a lot of unecessary rambling, it took four drafts for me to realize that, although I had solidified my claim, I hadn't backed it up with enough solid evidence. I originally thought that this draft would be my final revision, but it became clear that there was a lot more work to be done.
5. In this fifth and final draft, I focused on the way both novels were constructed, and how I could accurately explain this in order to support my argument without going into too much detail and turning the essay into pure literary analysis. I didn't want it to lose its readable, approachable qualities. While I think I executed this compromise in a fairly promising way, there is, as always, still room for improvement and expansion. I no longer feel as if there are gaping holes in my arguement, however, and so, at least for the time being, this draft will serve as the fifth and final draft.