Brandon Pitchford

4/21/2013

English Comp II

Editing and Revising

Being a college student I can clearly see how the average writer can become “cluttered” or “flustered” when writing paper with the increase flow of all this new information. When you find all these different articles or facts off the Internet or textbooks we students can sometimes put too much information in our papers and not have enough sited sources. Often times the cluttering of essay and point can side track or even confuse the reader. This is the reason the revision of essays is 100 percent fool proof and is essential to have an extra set of eyes read your own work. In the essay "Simplicity," William Zinnser states, "clutter is the disease of American writing" (129). With writing any type of paper the writer may run into the same problems that pelages many students, which is the clutter of information. Today generation have an almost infinite amount of sources of information on the Internet trying to document each source is often not taking into account. The biggest problem that professors have is to advise students to site their sources to comply with MLA format; but if hey have too much information and don’t source their information they are plagiarizing. With today’s technology becoming smarter the younger generations are losing some of their grammar skills with spell check or auto spell. In "Its Academic, or Is it?” Charles R. Larson writes how students writing grammatically correct sentences are having problems because they use too much of their time texting. Adults also are succumbing to simple grammatical mistakes with the new technology that auto fixes them. With the newer technology coming soon the grammar skills of American will definitely drop. A proven method on trying to expand your grammatical IQ is to read more often. In "Like I Said, Don't Worry," Patricia T. O'Conner states that it is not important to pay attention to the linguistic terms attached to grammar when revising: "With the intimidating terminology out of the way, most people express a lively, even passionate interest in English and how it works" (144). The reading of books, magazines, or newspapers daily can start someone’s passion for literature, which in hindsight it is a trait that not a lot of people embrace or engage in. In conclusion students can relapse into a pattern that happens to the best of writes and that is the clutter or an essay. The students that fall into this pattern sometimes don’t realize that what they are writing. With revising and editing these problems can be resolved, but the only way they can fully if they are able to find a passion for literature.

Cited Work
Zinnser, William. "Simplicity." Language Awareness: Readings for College Writers. Ed. Paul Eschholz, Alfred Rosa, and Virginia Clark. New York: 2009. 129-134.

Larson, Charles R. "Its Academic, or Is it?" Language Awareness: Readings for College Writers. Ed. Paul Eschholz, Alfred Rosa, and Virginia Clark. New York: 2009. 137-138.

O'Conner, Patricia. "Like I Said, Don't Worry." Language Awareness: Readings for College Writers. Ed. Paul Eschholz, Alfred Rosa, and Virginia Clark. New York: 2009. 143-145.