Blog Post 9: BBG 9

In this chapter, the book describes the importance of reviewing your work, no matter what it is or how well you think you've written it the first time around. Like Anne Lamott writes in "Shitty First Drafts," the first words you put to paper are not meant to be the best, they are meant to be whatever you need them to be to get started, even if getting started means writing something completely disorganized and unreadable. If you try to write perfectly immediately, you will never be able to get anything done. Revising is an important step in the writing process, one that can alleviate the stress of trying to be an amazing writer the first time you sit down to write. Although as the book mentions, revising your own paper can be helpful, as you can often pick up on things you miss the second time around, I find that getting someone else to look over my paper is always the most effective way of figuring out what changes I need to make. When I let my paper leave my hands and enter someone else's, they are viewing my work with fresh eyes, and are always able to help me work through problems I was struggling with or find small grammar errors that I would have never caught myself.

The book also introduces the idea of remixing, which is something I have heard a lot in class but have never fully understood until this moment. BBG defines remixing as repurposing, “changing the purpose, audience, and/or message of your original piece.” It does not involve any new information, just a new way of sharing that information with the world. The concept of remixing is interesting to me, as it requires you to think a different way about something that you have already created in another way. Remixing seems to be a great way of presenting research to multiple audiences without having to do a great deal of unnecessary work, simply changing the format but not the information.