Chorebanian 1

Tyler Chorebanian

Ms. Michko

E Block

6/6/2024

Protest Song Rhetorical Analysis Revision Reflection

To start my task of revising my protest song rhetorical analysis essay on the song Born in

the U.S.A. by Bruce Springsteen I skimmed through the essay and highlighted any key points that

I understood needed work. These key points were two of my topic sentences, a few sections of

commentary, and two of my concluding sentences. Each of these structural pieces lacked

specificity and a clear line of reasoning. The first section I took down was the topic sentences.

My main goal when revising these was to get rid of any confusion that took away from the main

point of the paragraph, as well as to ensure that my topic sentence was connected directly back to

the thesis statement. This was the topic sentence of my second body paragraph “​​Springsteen

highlights the societal hardships that veterans face the idea of being trapped in the U.S.A. is

visited and the sorrowful tone of the song is built.” This sentence did a decent job of reflecting

the impact of the evidence to be presented when referring to the tone; however, the sentence

structure was very condensed, making it difficult to understand and ultimately taking away from

the sentence's strength. To improve this topic sentence I broke the sentence up into three pieces

and made more specific references to my evidence. Consequently, my topic sentence became

much easier to follow. This improved my line of reasoning, which aided me in improving my

commentary because I had a clearer understanding of what claim I was supporting. In my

analysis, I lacked specificity; to improve my analysis, I had to dive deeper into the meaning of

Springsteen's lyrics, and the impact they had. For instance, initially, I did not fully understand my
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second piece of evidence in my first body paragraph, “I'm a long gone Daddy in the U.S.A.

now”... “I'm a cool rocking Daddy in the U.S.A. now” (Springsteen). Prior to revising, I did not

realize that “Cool Rocking Daddy” was a reference to Springsteen himself and that “Long Gone

Daddy” was referring to the character in the song. Once I understood this, I was able to revise

my commentary by talking about what impact this comparison has. This approach to analyzing

the song was stronger and more detailed than the previous one and allowed me to improve my

commentary a decent amount. My final revisions were on the concluding sentences of my body

paragraphs. Similarly to my topic sentences, I focused on edits to my conclusions that made

them more detailed, overall improving my line of reasoning. To be more specific, in my original

essay, my concluding sentences simply summarized my body paragraphs. In my revisions,

however, I focused on referring back to the evidence I used and outlining how the evidence

contributed to my thesis.