Ayaha’s Essay is Good but Could Be Better

 

From middle school to high school to college to professional level, academics or sports, everything becomes harder. This is because competition increases. That is because people keep improving, people keep getting better. There is always room for growth, no matter how excellent one is at their craft. Similarly, Ayaha Ikezawa’s work is very good, but I have revised it to make it better, and analysed the changes.

 

Although improvements occur, it is vital to recognise the original authentic quality work. For Ayaha, the part which really stuck out was her original idea. Ayaha wrote about Grendel’s mother’s motherly nature and how she “would cry, love, fight, and get killed for its only offspring” (Ikezawa 1). This is was a big twist for me because until that point, I was only reading about how horrible the character is, clearly following the thesis. But then all of a sudden, I saw a mature and almost an opposite perspective; it ended the writing with a broader point of view, with something to let audience think about. This is why this is quite a nice piece to read.

 

Although her idea was very nice, there were a few organisational issues I worked on. First of all, there were no set introductory and concluding sentences, thus I made sure all the body paragraphs had them. This allows for a higher level organisation. Moreover, Ayaha’s ideas were jumping around, especially in the first paragraph. First she talks about Grendel being the Creator’s enemy and how she is prayed for being killed, but then she mentions how the Creator’s decision of killing her is crude. I cleared that by making it all flow. Then there is also an inconsistency as Ayaha refers to god as the Creator, the Almighty, and God throughout the piece. I made sure it was always the Creator. Lastly, the quotes were talked about but not cited in the text, so I cited them properly. This way, I covered most of her organisational issues and cleared them.

 

Throughout the refining process, I learned a few things, but most importantly reminded myself of not putting my voice into another person’s work. I did find this challenging as along with organisational issues, there were a lot of grammatical issues. Working on both of these matters, my voice naturally flowed in. And thus, although I could improve on word choice and sentence structure, I stopped at grammar and logical organisation as I felt that the improvement was being overtaken by my way of writing. This is something to keep in mind if we ever work on others’ works, again.