At the beginning of the semester, I made frequent grammatical mistakes. Whether it was adding a comma where it’s not needed, using the wrong “there,” or using the wrong punctuation to close out a sentence. I would make common mistakes, stuff that I know, but I wouldn’t take the time to deeply read over my piece to fix those mistakes.

The example below it’s from Essay #1, focusing on the red underlines and how I had sentence-level errors.

As you can tell I misused “there” when it’s supposed to be “their,” and I didn’t have a question mark after “taught.” These are all mistakes that can easily be fixed through proofreading, but I found myself skimming over my piece rather than deeply reading it at the beginning of the semester. This is just a sentence-level error, and it’s easy to miss these in your essay, but I found this occurring less and less in my next two essays.

Here’s an example from Essay #3, where I focus on my punctuation and minimizing grammatical mistakes. Pay attention to how I respond to the question I bring up in the essay.

Here you can tell, I’m trying to engage the reader by asking a question, and then when I answer it, I focus on my use of commas, and punctuation. My proofreading overall in Essay #3 was a lot better than any of my other essays. After re-reading Essay #3 multiple times before turning it in, it made me feel the best as my sentence-level mistakes were definitely minimized.

With such a focus on global revision this semester, we also never lost sight of local revision, because it’s just as important. The reason we focused so much on global revision is that we’re so used to using local revision when revising others and our own pieces, we tend to just focus on grammatical and sentence-level errors. Instead, this semester we began looking at the bigger picture, which was useful and helped improve my own revision process and during peer review. But for me, I also feel like I also improved with local revision, as I think I minimized my grammatical mistakes as the semester progressed and from Essay #1 to Essay #3.