Student writer Michelle Nguyen wrote the essay “A Place to Begin” in response to an assignment that challenged her to think about how her experiences with writing, positive or negative, have shaped her as a writer. To get started, Nguyen listed various people who had influenced her writing and brainstormed about her experiences in ESL classes. As she reviewed her notes, she realized she wanted to focus her narrative on a single influential individual.

Here is the draft that Nguyen submitted, together with the comments she received from three of her classmates.

[View PDF]

After reading her draft and considering the feedback from her classmates, Nguyen realized that she had chosen a good direction but that she hadn’t focused her draft to meet the expectations of the assignment. As her classmates pointed out, her rough draft was more a portrait of the Vietnam War veteran and not really a literacy narrative. With her classmates’ questions and suggestions in mind, Nguyen developed some goals for revising her draft.

• Add a title.
• Revise introduction to set the scene more dramatically. Use Sameera’s idea to include a photo of my Vietnamese neighborhood.
• Make the story my story, not the man’s story. What did the man see in me? Delete extra material about the old man.
• Answer Brian’s question: What is my main idea?
• Follow Alex’s question about the contrast between quiet and noise and Brian’s suggestion about the connection between wordlessness and worldliness. Make the contrasts sharper between the noisy neighborhood and the quiet stillness of the man’s house.
• Theme about literacy needs to be clearer. Figure out what main idea I’m trying to communicate. The surprise was finding writing in silence, not in the noisy exchange of voices in my neighborhood.