After reading Margaret Kantz’s “Helping Students Use Textual Sources Persuasively” one thing she discussed stood out to me. She says, “Some students think that if they can’t do the paper in one draft that means that something is wrong with them as writers, or with the assignment, or with us for giving the assignment. Often, such students will react to their drafts with anger and despair, throwing away perfectly usable rough drafts and then coming to us and saying that they can’t do the assignment” (80-81). This quote resonated with me because for as long as I can remember I never understood the importance of drafts.
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I always envisioned them as being so unnecessary. I am the type of person that likes to sit down and write for hours, and I felt like that’s when I produce my best work, but college showed me that that just wasn’t true. Kantz also says that “we can use the sequence of drafts to demand that our students demonstrate increasingly sophisticated kinds of analytic and rhetorical proficiency” (81). In our class specifically, I saw myself doing just that. With each draft I noticed where my argument needed more analysis or where I needed to completely remove a statement. I was able to organize and then reorganize the structure with each revision to improve the flow of my essay. Kantz described what I was doing wrong and told me how to do it right, and our class allowed me to execute those lessons in an academic setting.
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