Technology

Sometimes, reviewing at our past work can be a surprising thing. It could be that our work was so good that we cannot believe that we were able to produce such a thing, or maybe we were so harried by requirements at the time that we made it that we looking our past work over, we realize that we did not make it to the level of quality we thought we did. Many of us, I think, sadly, experience the latter much more often than the first. Sometimes it is a subtle thing, we realize that we missed a few typos here and there, or misspelled a few words, but sometimes we realize that what we made (wrote) did not make much sense at all. Fortunately, though I had many instances of the former, it was not as bad as the latter for me when I revised this paper.

What I did notice when I saw it again though, was how cluttered the paper was, it was hard to tell one paragraph from another, and the headings seemed to just blend into the paragraphs. The first thing I changed in my paper was the format I realized it is so hard to understand a paper when all the words and ideas seem to just blend together. I looked up the basics of MLA formatting and followed them. I added indentations to the start of the paragraphs and added a little space inbetween them, updated my citation styles, and added an outline type of numbering for my headings so the reader can see the flow of the idea and which topics fall under another topic. Only after that did I proceed to comb out the content.

I was rather satisfied with what I had written content-wise though, as I know how hard I worked on gathering the information and putting them to paper in a coherent manner. Thus, I decided not to change the content much at all, except to enhance or elaborate on a point here and there. I did have a few problems with my sentences though, I never noticed that before. They lacked conviction and authenticity, somehow even to me some of them seemed awkward and just not compelling enough. I think, at the time, I was too absorbed in getting relevant information and arranging them in way that was simple and logical that it did not matter much to me how something sounded. Since then though, I have learned that how you present your ideas, even though they are technical facts and figures, can greatly influence how your readily your audience accepts your information. After all, how will they learn anything from you when they cannot understand the way that you are trying to put your point across, or when what you are saying is totally unconvincing

Fortunately, the website where I found the MLA style guide had many other writing tips, including grammar and punctuation use. I realized that I made many mistakes I did not even know were mistakes. One hint that I had learned a little while ago was to read the sentences out loud, and to revise them if they sounded wrong or awkward. This way, I rephrased many of my sentences, to make the ideas more clear and give the sentences more impact, to make the entire paper more dynamic.