Formalist Analysis Revision If you received a grade of B- or below you can revise and resubmit your formalist analysis for a higher grade. But your revision should be directed; it should be the result of a careful critique of the original paper and a systematic approach to its revision. To submit a paper for a revised grade, you'll need to do the following: I. Read over the feedback you received and look again at the grading rubric. Use it to assess your revision needs. What needs work here? If your thesis and your argumentation/evidence are both in need of revising, the odds are good that you weren't entirely clear what you were arguing about the text--that you were still in the process of developing your ideas about the text and not quite ready to write a full argumentative essay about it. Is your thesis vague? In what ways? Go back to Eagleton and to the poetry cheat sheet and do more exploratory writing about the text. Reread your draft, and then reread the poem; what details of the poem did you ignore in your paper? Why? What happens when you account for them now? What additional insights do they offer? Craft a new thesis that includes specific details about this poem--details that customize your claim to this text, and this text only--and that make a specific claim about the poem's meaning. If your thesis is reasonably sound, but the argumentation and evidence were less successful, you may be leaving out important steps in your reasoning about the text, assuming the reader sees what you see in the lines. You're writing for yourself, rather than an audience. The time that's elapsed since you wrote the paper should help; reread the draft and look for those moments when your discussion feels shallow, when you can't follow the reasoning that holds one sentence to the next, when you don't fully flesh out your thinking, or when there's more to be said about the details of the text. If organization was the big issue for your paper, odds are you tried to structure your paper around specific formal features of verse, rather than the movement of the reader through the poem. That is, if you have paragraphs that begin with sentences like, "Tone is an important aspect of this poem," rather than "In the second stanza, the speaker's tone becomes more urgent," you've likely relied on a less effective organizational strategy. Think about how the reader experiences the poem as they move through it, line by line, stanza by stanza. How does the tone change? What specific details cause the tone to change? Why does the tone change over the course of the poem? An explication (another word for a formalist analysis) usually moves through the text systematically. That helps prevent repetition, and it forces you to attend to the details of each stanza or line; organizing around formal properties can lead to vague claims about the text in general. II. Determine whether you need only to expand or reorganize, or whether your revision will be substantial enough that you're actually writing a new draft. You miay be further ahead thinking of your paper as one more "exploration" of the text. In that case, open a new document and start over. III. When you have a fairly well developed new draft, take time to gloss it. Finally, when you proofread your paper, be sure to consult  Lit Crit Papers: What Faculty Know but Don't Always Articulate. When you hand in your revision, you'll need to provide me with the original paper, your notes in response to the questions, and your gloss! If you don't, I won't read it!