Cut and paste...literally

Here are pictures of my final paper for Rhetoric and the Public Sphere. Here are all ten pages that I spent weeks writing because it's worth 20% of my grade. (Of course, I printed out a fresh copy to turn in). The main comment I got on my rough draft a couple of weeks ago was that I had all the content I needed, I just had to completely restructure the essay to make a logical progression. Doesn't sound too hard, right? Well, after a confusing hour of cutting and pasting paragraphs on my word processor, plus the hours I originally spent writing the paper, all the paragraphs started looking the same and I couldn't make sense of anything.

Finally, I went to ask my professor for advice. She said cut it. Literally, take scissors and cut the paragraphs out. Lay them on the floor and start rearranging them manually. She said that these types of edits are best done by hand and not on the computer because it makes more sense to move them around physically. Scrolling up and down on the computer would only be confusing. It certainly was. She also said that the whole process of cutting up my paper would be therapeutic. She was right again.

I took her adivce and soon I had paragraphs and scraps of paper all over my carpet. There were Post-it notes everywhere. It was awesome. What I couldn't do in an hour on the computer, I was able to do in about 15 minutes. It was just a lot easier to visualize everything.

This certainly was a valuable lesson in paper editing, and it worked. My professor gave me a 96.