Chapters 5, 6, and 7 show Latrisha Wilson’s progress in planning and drafting an essay on surveillance. Below you can see her first-draft paragraph (also included in Chapter 7 as part of her first draft essay) and her revision to strengthen the paragraph.

FIRST-DRAFT PARAGRAPH

When the word surveillance comes up, maybe you think of some thrilling and dangerous activity, like the kind of spying on foreign terrorists that goes on in James Bond movies. In the US today, most spying is done by surveillance computers. Edward Snowden bounced around for weeks from one airport to another, and lived for a while in the Moscow airport, eating who knows what and sleeping who knows where. The NSA seems to be able to do whatever it wants without having to answer to anyone or suffer any consequences. But we can’t say the same for whistleblowers. Just look what they did to Bradley Manning! And now, the US government is aggressively pursuing Snowden. The NSA is more and more aggressively protecting its own secrecy, by punishing whistleblowers, and lying to Congress and, it seems as if they are more concerned about themselves than the people they are spying on.

Revised Paragraph

When the word surveillance comes up, people think of some thrilling and dangerous activity, like the spying on foreign terrorists that goes on in James Bond movies. But in the U.S. today, most spying isn’t done by handsome secret agents out to save the world; it’s done by surveillance computers, and they monitor U.S. citizens, not just foreign terrorists. For example, consider what we learned from the whistleblower Edward Snowden, who sacrificed his career as a contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) to alert the public to the deals the NSA makes with companies like Microsoft, Facebook, and Verizon to collect personal information and monitor everything their customers do on the internet or speak into a telephone.