Blog Post #8

There are several recommendations, specifically from Chapter 14 of Tell It Slant, that I found helpful while revising my essay. The first suggestion I noticed was to question, "Why does this essay exist?" Although a seemingly simple reflective question, it is an important one. There should be a reason behind any piece, a specific audience in mind. For Cara Italia, I want the focus to be about the personal transformation I experienced while studying abroad. Reading through my essay, I think I got caught up in describing the sights of Italy. It is a beautiful country and I want to give it the attention it deserves. However, some revisions I'm making on my essay are to include more personal feelings/reflections while I'm in those moments. I don't want to take out the descriptions of my excursions, but I want to add more depth to them. I think this will show how much I changed while I was abroad and shift the focus of my essay to what I intended it to be: growth. As a result, the final diary entry of my essay will tie in more nicely with the rest. I think a lot of people have experienced growth while traveling; therefore, my piece will be more relatable.

Another recommendation from Chapter 14 that I found interesting was to eliminate certain verbs (is, are, were, was, etc.) or replace them with stronger ones. When writing, I become fully absorbed in the time and place that I am writing about. I don't usually struggle putting my thoughts onto paper. At the same time, I don't really think too much about what I'm writing. Going through my essay and testing each verb has been a learning experience for me as a writer. For example, one of my previous sentences read, "We were a group of college kids; no one was with their lover." This statement sets the scene, but it can be stronger. I changed it to: "Most young people studying abroad do not have lovers to leash along with them." As the book says, eliminating the verb "were" made the sentence sound cleaner and more professional. It also eliminated the semicolon. I tend to include a lot of compound sentences in my writings, with a lot of commas. Therefore, eliminating the verb caused me to restructure the sentence and encouraged sentence variety. I hope that this change engages my readers more and improves the flow of the story. 

I'm finding that revising my essay is harder than when I initially wrote it. Writing is where I feel safest -- scrutinizing it almost feels like betraying the purity of it. This course (specifically the workshop) has taught me that my voice will still sound the same even if the words are different. I'm grateful to receive feedback from a variety of writers and to learn from them.