Richard Marius Analysis

Lizbeth Mora
English 106
Michael Buckoff
April 12, 2015
Compare and Contrast with Marius During the course of students’ educational careers we come across many assignments that require us to write an essay on a specific topic in which we use different writing methods and steps to develop a completed paper. To help students with their writings, Richard Marius, a very educated and well known writer has written an article titled Writing Drafts in which he describes his own writing techniques that he uses to write an essay. In this essay I will compare and contrast the writing techniques of Richard Marius and the writing methods I use when I write an essay. Although Marius differs than I do in the way he prints out his drafts, we are similar
For example, in his article he suggest that we print out what we have written so far, get up from where we are sitting, sit somewhere else and read it. Then before bedtime re-read it so that we can subconsciously organize and create ideas while we sleep so that in the morning we wake up to possibly discovering new ideas. On the other hand, when I worked on my history assignment I did not do what Marius suggested. Instead I printed out my first draft and took it to my teacher so that she can read it and give me feedback on what she thinks I need to work on in order to have a more developed paper. However, Marius and I are similar in the way we brainstorm ideas. In his article he suggests to write down a list on topics and ideas that we would like to cover in the essay, not really focusing on the order of importance of ideas but just to get ideas flowing and that is exactly what I do before I begin writing my first draft. I think about my main subject and I branch off different sub topics by writing a list of points I want to address in my paper. This method helps me on the development of ideas for my paper and I find it really
For instance, Marius advises not to hesitate in changing the second draft if you have come up with new ideas. In his article Marius states, “If your thesis changed while you were writing your first draft, you will base your second draft on this new subject” (Marius 92). Changing a thesis in an essay is a very radical move when writing because that means you have to re-evaluate the whole essay in order for it to connect with your thesis. Similarly, when I worked on the second draft of my history assignment in addition to editing the few things my teacher had suggested after showing her my first draft, I made very big changes to my paper. I completely changed my thesis and cut out unnecessary subjects that I had wrote in my first draft. By doing this it helped me to expand my thought process on my history assignment and I was able to add a vast amount of information to my