Anthony Calvo!

Writing Process Audio Essay!

The writing process essentially began when I first heard the general topic.

Although, I had not yet, heard the exact prompt I knew it had to do with screens and

literacy. In between classes I began thinking of my experiences that involved both, in a

meaningful way. This was incredibly difficult as I have had many experiences with both

of these. In writing and rhetoric class, I wrote stream of conscious responses guided by

Dr. McLaughlin. When I got back to my dorm and heard the prompt I was considerably

perplexed by what it encompassed and wanted. I continued adding onto two stream of

conscience prompts. One had to do with the role of screens in making reading enjoyable,

while the other was about my formation process as a writer. The role of screens topic

was easier to continue stream of conscience so I chose that as the focus of my narrative,

but I still kept some pieces of my formation as a writer.

Once it came time to write my first draft no more ideas came to my head and

every sentence I wrote seemed horrible. Since I was making no progress I decided to

read Ann Lamott’s Shitty First Drafts. After reading Lamott’s paper I felt inspired to

write down all my crummy sentences and piece them together later. I did some very

minor revisions so that the essay made chronological sense before going to the next

class. At the next class, as I read my essay aloud I found numerous mistakes and even

had trouble figuring out the meaning of one or two sentences. Mark and Joe( people I

read my paper to) gave me helpful criticism and praise. They enjoyed the level of

description in some parts, but felt I was just making statements rather than descriptions

in other parts of the essay. Also that the there were two separate stories that really had

no link between them. A few days later I changed major meaning errors and

incorporated what Mark and Joe had advised. I added vivid description to each piece of

my essay. Next, I found the underlying message of both separate stories which was

essentially the role screens have played in my reading and writing development. I went

back through the essay and added the character’s thoughts into the story. It allowed for

synopsis of the descriptions without it being explicitly stated.

Even after having made several drafts and revisions my narrative still felt like it

was lacking some major aspect, but I could not quite figure out what. I also made a test

recording and realized my paper was about a minute and a half too long. So I decided to

meet with Dr. McLaughlin after class. She gave me several recommendations. One being

to cut out unnecessary description, in the Pokemon portion of my essay. She pointed out

parts that still lacked description. She also noticed a few other areas of improvement

that I jotted down in my notebook. Most importantly she gave me relative confidence

that my paper was not horrible. I fixed the errors and added description to my paper,

but waited until I recorded to start cutting portions of my essay out.

Finally, I borrowed a friend’s headset and microphone and went down to

Keough’s basement. I recorded the entire essay paragraph by paragraph and the total

time came out to about 6 minutes. I went back and deleted the parts Dr. McLaughlin

had advised me to. The revision came out to about 5 minutes and 30 seconds. I went

back through my essay multiple times taking out pieces that were not essential to the

story and re-recording the paragraphs. Alas, I was able to trim my recording down to

about 5 minute and 5 seconds. I listened to the recording twice over ensuring there were

no errors.