Re-Purposing an Argument

For the re-purposing of “Vision Correction”,  I chose CNN.com’s Opinion section as my inspiration and venue a little too cavalierly, what I should have chosen was The New Yorker, but in the end I’m glad. If I chose the New Yorker, I wouldn’t really have pushed myself. In order to suit my venue I read a bunch of CNN.com opinion articles. I looked at the common features, an intro related to a news story,  relatively simple paragraph and sentence structure, and a short length.  The article, though, that most inspired me was “Why does college cost so much?” because it incorporated that structure, and spoke of societal problems with a personal touch like I tried to do in this essay. Unfortunately, this was done before my fourth draft rather than my first. For that one as you can see from my Bibliography I used a variety of sources, not really related to CNN’s approach. So in the end, I had to take an over 2,000 word essay and slash it down to 800-1000 words and completely change the tone. Essentially re-purpose my re-purposed argument.

As you might be able to tell, for me, the Re-Purposing Project was a journey. I hate using that word. It’s cliche. But sometimes cliches are cliches for a reason. Like with a journey, you start one place and you end in a completely different one. While you’re on the way, you end up learning something. That’s what happened with Bilbo in the Hobbit.  Along the way he met a dragon, a troll, and a deranged cave creature obsessed with a ring, but ultimately he learned that at the core hobbits are made of stern stuff.  That was my thing. My ideas at the core were strong but my presentation needed tempering in order to be suitable for my audience and my venue.

In order to do that, there was  a lot of trial and error. And ruthless cutting of sections. So much,  I was like Golem clutching to some sections, mumbling “my precious”.  I had to get over myself and allow myself to experiment  and fail. This led a lot of flexing of my revision and reflection skills.You can see the steps in my journey to write this paper and to work on those skills below.

Note: These are all PDFs except for the Final Draft. This is because they give you access to my reflective comments, which were instrumental in the revision process.

Proposal 

Draft 1

Draft 2

Draft 3

Final Draft

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