Exercise 5.3 - 11/20/13

The exercise we did in class today was the strangest thing I have ever done to an essay.  I ended up cutting up my paper by paragraphs and rearranging the order.  Then, I arranged them into piles that either showed it was on-topic with my thesis or was not.  If it was, I kept it, but if not, it went in the "reject pile."  Once the two piles were determined, I looked at the "keep" paragraphs and determined if the paragraphs provided evidence, explained a key point, illustrated a key concept, established importance, or raised/answered a question that is relevant to my thesis.  Tonight, this blog post is about the new developments I found through this exercise.  For the first part, I was asked to rearrange the structure of my essay.  I don't think I was hard enough on my essay when I was first dismembering it, so I kept all of my paragraphs, which basically means the first new structure was pretty much the same as when I started, except for a few paragraph switches.  To me, it seemed to flow well and I felt that it did a good job of supporting my thesis.  The second time, I tried really hard to switch the order, and I think it worked a lot better.  I started with the drawbacks of not having a K-9 unit and then moving into the benefits, followed by the "why" factor.  I feel like this structure did a better job at presenting my point more clearly and flowed well, even though I need to add some more information to fill the small gaps I found by switching the order.  Overall, I liked this exercise to help re-see my essay because it gave the opportunity to see my essay through my readers' eyes.  Plus, it was a much tougher way of critiquing my paper because I had to really focus and judge my writing to get my point across as clearly as possible.  Through this exercise, I found what I needed to change and the reasons for it, and this helped me see the flaws in my paper that I need to fix.