Revising My First Draft - Caley Savoie

How should I revise my first draft? How should I go about looking for problems that need to be fixed in my paper? How can I revise my paper without being bias towards my own writing? These are all questions that most of you would probably ask yourself when you are revising a paper you have written. I know that I asked myself a few of these questions as I was revising my first draft over a narrative about technology.
First of all they say that when starting a revision look at the purpose of your paper. Should the thesis of your paper be at the beginning or towards the middle, which would make the purpose more clear to the reader. You also need to look at the audience you are writing to. Should you put in specific details in the beginning paragraphs that will help them relate to what you are writing? Having good support of evidence is good when revising. Make sure that what you have stated about your argument, you have enough evidence to back it up. Also, make sure that you can provide information to the reader that enables them to understand what you are saying. Donald Murray says, " The writer reads and rereads and rereads, standing far back and reading quickly from and distance, moving in close and and reading slowly line by line..." I took this as him saying that writers may revise too much. Others may take what he said differently, but I think that revising is a good thing, as long as there is a limit to where you stop. If a writer analyzes his/her writing too much, it could end up making the paper even worse than the first draft. In revising get someone else to read your first draft of a paper, preferably a writing teacher or tutor. Take what they have to say with a great assault and do the best you can to make it more reader friendly.
I know that for my first draft of my first paper for a college class I was a bit terrified. First of all I wasn't really sure on what to write. After I found a good topic I had so many ideas that I just kept writing them. In class we had a peer review session and the feed back that I received from my peers was that it was a good storyline but a bit repetitive. So I took that, along with my teachers' input and tried to do as much as I could to revise it. The reading that I have just blogged about, actually really helped me out with what I was struggling on in revising my first draft.