Post your reflection on Revise/rethink

TORDA'S SPRING 2026 TEACHING SITE

Post your reflection on Revise/rethink

9/17/2025

We will talk about this in class: but please post the reflection on the state of your revise/rethink piece to this space.

8 Comments

Anna Dykhoff

9/17/2025 02:22:13 pm

I plan to revise and rewrite a handout I made for my psychology of women class. I wrote this piece just last week for a class discussion I was leading in Intersectionality in the study of women’s psychology. This piece is appealing to me because I have notes from the class discussion as well, and I am interested in expanding this work into a formal essay on the importance of intersectionality in feminism. I have strong foundations for the psychological side of intersectionality, and I can use my textbook to further expand on these ideas. I also have been reading many scholarly articles about the study of women, so I am comfortable finding sources for this work. However, because this piece of writing is very bare bones, much of my work for this project will consist of expanding what I have rather than revising, which may be challenging for this project. Because of this, I am thinking about instead possibly developing this into a lesson plan on intersectionality in psychology, or as a guidebook for researchers in women’s psychology. Depending on how my workshop goes, I will choose a specific direction for this project and begin to plan out my course of action from there. I believe that this revision could be very useful for those who wish to study women’s psychology or psychology in general, and I would love to make something that could be used practically.

Alexandra O'Brien

9/22/2025 09:43:57 am

I am not sure why it's not letting me post my own separate thread, so I am posting as a reply comment here!

About 2 years ago, I started working on a piece about my father. I plan to take what little I have with it and develop it into a much larger and in-depth piece, although I have been busy revising other work, which put this one on the back burner. But I would love to come back to what I have and try to fine-tune it before I add any more to it.

I wrote the beginning of this while free-writing on my laptop - so the grammar is bad, the organization of it could be fixed, the flow isn't completely there, and much more could be improved. I was really just writing down thought - thought - thought until I reached a good flow state where I felt my best writing was coming out. I really want to go back and shape up this piece of writing, as it is still in an untouched ROUGH ROUGH draft form and has a lot of potential. I do a lot of these free-writes, but never come back to really turn them into something, and I think this would be good revision work for me. It has a lot of potential. I love a lot of the content in it, and it would be something to really dig my teeth into, as it gives me a lot to revise. And I think my skills as a writer have evolved so much, and I think a revision would read so differently compared to the draft - and that would be fun to see.

Nina Hamel

9/17/2025 04:17:56 pm

For my Rethink/Revise assignment, I have decided to focus on a final paper I wrote for my Intro to Film class during my Freshman year of college. We were tasked to write about a specific element of a film that we discussed during the semester, then discuss that element with a move of my choice. I decided to focus on Little Women (2019), and the costume choices made by hte lead designer, Jacqueline Durran. I took the approach to not only describe the pieces and how they related to the time period of the film, but also the underlying meaning of aspects of the costumes such as color or styled piece. Little Women (2019) is my favorite film and I find that I could talk about it for hours, hence my continued interest in editing a piece related to the movie that I wrote. I know that I have a lot of passion and knowledge of the film, so having the opportunity to strengthen this piece in terms of editing and re-writing the content I have presented, I think it could result in a very strong piece.
In terms of what is already working for the piece, I think the research and content of the essay is sufficient enough to serve for the purpose of the essay. It is a mix of my own observations along with academic articles that discuss costuming in film, as well as other sources that help support my ideas. Besides the content, I think that the other aspects of the essay, specifically the language and structure, there is a lot of work to do. I personally think that this piece could use a great deal of work in the revision process. For starters, the general language and grammar in the piece is begging for support. I would like to adjust sentences to sound smoother, as well as revisit certain grammar and punctuation errors that I missed or was not aware of at the time. I would also definitely like to revisit the structure of the essay. I think that it needs some work in terms of organization, and I think the intro and conclusion (which seems nonexistent) could use some work for the re-write. I also need to work on the language used. In order to make this piece sound more professional, it needs to abandon the “student” voice and take on a more matter-of-fact tone. I definitely think my personal tone in my writing has changed over the course of the past couple years, so I think in an overall sense, I want to make the writing feel more like me. I recognize the content and ideas that are present, they are ideas that I have accumulated over time. By the end of this revision, I would like this piece to feel professional, clear, organized, and more like myself.

Ashley Luise

9/17/2025 04:49:13 pm

I chose to reimagine my cultural autobiography I wrote two years ago for Cultural Rhetorics with Dr. Anderson. I can’t recall if writing a narrative was a requirement for this assignment or just the medium I chose; it was familiar, comfortable, and relatively easy for me to write and get a good grade. Writing about how my maternal family, specifically the three generations of women before me, use food as a way to show love was really special. This concept is one I’d like to commemorate eternally in writing. However, the project I turned in to Dr. Anderson reads like it was written by a very amateur student writer. While that is true, I don’t want the final iteration of a piece that is so close to my heart to remain like this. I believe in and am so passionate about this story being told, but I want to write it like a professional writer would, rather than like a student scrambling to fit the parameters of an assignment.
I do not think my concept is what is weak about this piece; instead, I think I could do much better at structuring it. I got the opportunity to refine my topic both with my peers and Dr. Anderson, in addition to time to think it through on my own. However, I executed my final narrative like a student in her first upper-division English class would. While this is to be expected, I hate how glaringly obvious it is that I hadn’t taken any workshop oriented or creative writing classes at the time this piece was written. Because of this, reading this narrative is not the compelling or engaging experience I wish it was. Its final iteration could really benefit from the knowledge I now have about creative writing.
This piece offers all of its ideas explicitly and does not ask the writer to think about much, which to me, feels like a trademark of a lot of student writing. In order to create a more professional piece, I would like to reimagine my narrative as a piece of creative nonfiction or a memoir. I know exactly the purpose I am trying to achieve, so all I really would need to do is reimagine the genre and structure it is told in. I remember when I learned the information I summarized in the current version, and these memories made into scenes implicitly getting my purpose across, alongside minimal summary, will make for a more compelling, engaging read for wider audiences outside of academia. I’ve been working some scene ideas out in my Writer’s Notebook, and I’m already a lot more excited about these early ideas than my current final product. Wholly restructuring this piece, while keeping the story it tells and the purpose it serves intact, will help me create a piece of writing that I am genuinely proud of and want to share with others, just as I feel about this aspect of my family history.

I.S.

9/18/2025 09:09:15 am

I wrote this short story when I was a sophomore for my fiction writing workshop class. It still appeals to me as a project to revise because it’s a story that’s been in my mind for a while now. I actually first developed a vague outline of it in my freshman year. The idea of attempting to turn it into a novel or book is intimidating. However, I’ve written scenes here and there that connect back to this piece. I want to further develop it as a short story so I can have a good foundation if I ever start seriously making it into something more. Additionally, I just really like my main character and enjoyed building the world she’s in.

From the notes I took during the workshop, people thought the strengths of the story was its use of media res, its descriptive scenes, and the way the elements of the story connected to one another. I think I did a decent job at using the five senses to create descriptive scenes. However, I don’t think it’s professional level writing yet and I’m not entirely sure how to get it there. I feel similarly about the way the elements of the story connected to one another. It’s not bad, but it could definitely be better.

Although the comments about what’s not strong in the piece are from the first draft, I think they remain true to the second draft as well. People thought I should expand more on the character’s relationships to one another by developing their personalities more and showing why they’re important to the protagonist. The main relationship that’s bothering me the most is the one between my protagonist and her parents. I dislike the flashback scene I have of them interacting (page 3-4), especially the dialogue. I think it feels unnatural and forced.

People also wanted the relationship between the village and the raiders to be clarified and expanded upon. I tried to do that, but I’m not entirely sure how effective it is because I struggled with knowing how to put it into the story without too much exposition.

The last big critique people had was that the pacing could’ve been slower, particularly during the action driven scenes and the ending. I’m not always sure how much or little to include for action scenes because I don’t want to make the reader confused or bored.

After rereading the story again, I also think I used the theme of fire too much when I revised it. I’m not sure if it’s just because this is my own writing, but it feels a bit cringey to be honest. So, I wonder if I should cut back on that more.

Anna Dykhoff

9/23/2025 09:03:32 am

REVISED REFLECTION (please ignore my earlier response)

For my rethink/revise project, I plan on revising an essay I wrote for Crit 111 in my freshman year at Bridgewater State. The essay is an argumentative piece on the article “Responsibility Without Blame for Addiction” by Hanna Pickard. Pickard’s essay argued for a model to approach addiction that held addicts responsible without blaming them for their addiction. My main arguments against the piece were that responsibility and blame are not clearly defined, and Pickard does not actually create or defend her model very well. The essay is highly theoretical, as we were assigned to work solely off arguing for or against the reasoning in the piece without including sources. One of the strong things about this piece is that the logic is fairly sound. I can tell I wrote this for a philosophy-based course, as I worked really hard to pick out specific theoretical examples to find flaws in the author’s argument. However, one of the weaknesses in this essay is that it has a few sweeping generalizations, and when these are not supported with any evidence, they leave the essay feeling weak and informal. Additionally, the writing is wordy and repetitive, which was likely due to an attempt to meet a word or page requirement.
Although this piece has its flaws and is clearly the product of a freshman in college, it still appeals to me as a base for a new project. I can tell from reading the paper that I truly cared about the subject matter, and I believe that is one of the most valuable parts of any piece of writing. To further engage with this essay, I plan on taking the basis of the arguments I made in the essay to develop a research proposal for a qualitative study on how the responsibility without blame framework impacts families and friends of those experiencing substance abuse disorder. This proposal will include a brief literature review, which I will use to develop a specific research question related to the content of the original piece. From there I will develop methodology and a list of interview questions that I think would be most effective for addressing the research question. I think that this will be an effective way to create a new piece of writing that has a function rather than rewriting the piece into another essay. The original piece is also, simply put, an argument without any direction. I would like to build a direction with my revision that could actually lead to suggestions for clinical settings or ways for families/loved ones to approach addiction.

Glen Beaulieu

9/24/2025 12:50:09 pm

Unfortunately, I do not have a lot of my older written work from school anymore. They were saved on an old computer of mine instead of backed up on Google drive, so I have no way of accessing them anymore. I really hate that, as it had a lot of the pieces that I wrote for some creative writing courses that I would love to come back to. The piece I chose for this assignment was an essay I wrote about Ernest Hemingway’s “A Way You’ll Never Be” for a modern American literature class I took last semester. This piece was something I really, really wanted to write about, as I have always been absolutely fascinated by the different depictions of war in art and literature. I found “A Way You’ll Never Be” to be an interesting glimpse into the soldier’s psyche during World War I, but I also found myself wishing that I could discuss other works, like "All Quiet on the Western Front," as I found that novel in particular to be much more in-line with what I wanted to talk about. I think I didn’t treat that paper like a paper on Hemingway; I wanted to write a paper on the clash between older, romanticized views on war and heroism with new-age industrialized warfare in general.

For things that I did well, I think my quotes and research were very poignant. I think I made my argument relatively well, but I think that it is too unfocused to be truly effective. That, I think, is the biggest issue with this paper, as it reads like two separate ideas combined into one: one about the depiction of war and heroism in war media in general, and one as it relates to Ernest Hemingway’s “A Way You’ll Never Be.” I think that I wanted too badly to talk about this topic in a more broad sense, so it made my paper less effective because of that, as I tried to make the story fit my argument as opposed to the other way around. For my revision, I’m still honestly thinking about how exactly I want to approach it, and I’m still thinking about what exactly I want to say. My favorite part of the essay was the part where I talked about the historical context of the so-called “heroism myth” during World War I. I know that I want to pivot away from this more formal research paper style, and I know that I also want to go beyond just talking about Hemingway. I’m very much interested in exploring other depictions of war in media, but I could also see myself attempting to write a more narrative piece that is in the spirit of “A Way You’ll Never Be.” Reading My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Boyd has made me think about trying to write a version of “A Way You’ll Never Be” but set in the modern day, such as the war in Ukraine, for example. Like World War I, we are seeing a clash of old doctrine and new technology and tactics, where trenches meet drone warfare and camouflaged uniforms meet thermal imaging.

Paul Sweeney

9/24/2025 01:26:17 pm

For my Think/Revise piece I'm going to be revising a chapbook I made for my poetry workshop class with Professor Mulroony back in the Fall 2024 semester. It was a collection of poetry I made over the course of the semester, revised and collated into one cohesive book, with a lengthy reflection essay following it. It was framed as a series of documents on poetry found within lost media, and the idea was that the man collecting them violated their sanctity in some way, such as rearranging the words, things like that. I like a lot of the ideas in it, and I still think some of the poems are strong in their concept, but a lot of the execution leaves a lot to be desired. I want to see if I can flesh it out into something more unique or meaningful or interesting, less blunt, less clumsy. Mulroony taught me that poetry is often a process of writing and rewriting and taking something and transforming it into something unrecognizeable, so I figure a project like this would be fitting for revision/rethinking.

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