December 1, 2012 Dear Reader, When we started off for our writing marathon I was prepared to journal a bit

and just enjoy the nice weather and the fact that we werent in class. And that I did, but when we were asked to turn our freewriting into an essay, I felt challenged. In no way do I journal my thoughts in an appropriate format for an essay. And I knew that essentially, I would get to keep the overall theme but I would have to start over with everything else. For the first draft, I had to change my writing process. Instead of just writing and organizing later, I wrote centered around one idea. A lot of my freewriting had mentioned how beautiful things were: the weather outside, musicians, a city lit with moonlight. I thought about beauty and the different ways we tend to see it when were surrounded with struggles and when were strolling in the park with our minds wide open. And because I knew I would later revise in other drafts, I just wrote as if I were freewriting, a kind of writing process I tried to stay away from in writing papers. From the first draft to the second, I focused on audience and direction. We had talked in class about knowing who were speaking to. So I really tried to be consistent with pronouns and speak to an audience that was both open and related to the topic. I made it an essay instead of a compilation of freewriting, and my purpose was just to give perspective, not to persuade. I still kept my writing voice, but I wanted to make sure I wasnt just writing to myself. The final draft, which I titled Finding It, shows how Ive learned to alter my writing process based on the assignment Im given. I was pretty happy with the ideas and content, so I focused more on fluency and choosing words that resonated with the reader to make things clearer. The differences between the first, second, and final draft are all elements I changed about my writing process by starting with raw journaled thoughts, revising those ideas to organize around the main idea and structure them as an essay, and then finally making editing changes to elements like word choice and clarity. I learned that I can keep the core of my writing process but change my focus each time I revise to reach a better final project.