To: J.

Larsen
From: Alexandra Silva
Date: 5 May 2015
Subject: MWA 1- Genre Revision

For the genre revision of the Final Portfolio of English 120 I have chosen to revise Major
Writing Assignment 1. Major Assignment 1 was a positon paper, in which I took the position of
agreeing with the proposal of a new requirement for high school students. This proposed
requirement would state that students would need to join an extracurricular activity either
through their high schools or their communities in order to graduate high school with a diploma.
A condition of this requirement was that students would need to join at least one club or
organization per school year during their high school careers. For MWA 1 I presented my
position with strong points about why this requirement should become enforced in the high
schools of New Mexico. I addressed both sides of the argument and gave statistics of the benefits
of high school students becoming more involved with their schools and communities. I revised
my position paper by taking a different point of view and writing for the opposite position.
I decided to take the opposing side for my revision because I knew it would be a
challenge to write against what I originally believed to be true. At the same time, I knew that my
opposing side for Major Writing Assignment 1 had a lot of strong points that I could elaborate
on. After writing my genre revision of the position paper, I am able to acknowledge that both
sides of this argument may be the right side, when before writing this revision, I only thought the
side agreeing with the proposed requirement was the right side. Pushing my own beliefs and

perspectives and turning them around was what I was hoping to accomplish with my genre
revision.
Besides taking a new angle and perspective of the argument at hand, I also made the
revision more of a persuasive paper rather than a position paper. With a position paper, the writer
should acknowledge both sides of the argument, regardless of what side they are taking. For
persuasive papers, the writer wants to keep the audience focused mainly on what the writers
position is and why it is the best position. For my revision, I wrote about why this requirement is
not a good idea, giving examples but rarely pointing out when the opposing side had a good
point or example of how the requirement would be beneficial. I chose not to talk too much about
the opposing side for my revision because that is exactly what I wrote about for the original
position paper.
For the original position paper, I researched facts about why being more involved with
their schools and communities would be beneficial to high school students. I used and cited these
findings in the original paper to make my points more clear. In the revision of MWA 1 I decided
not to research why it would not be beneficial to students to have to join an extracurricular
activity. Instead, I made it more personal by incorporating my own experiences with
extracurricular activities throughout high school. I used my personal experiences to show that
this requirement could bring about negative effects on students and at the same time I was the
proof of those claims.
The genre revision I made to the position paper of Major Writing Assignment 1 was
taking it from one point of view to the complete opposite. This was accomplished through
approaching the argument with a new perspective. In doing this I made the revision more of a
persuasive paper rather than a position paper. I also used more personal experiences with my

revision of MWA 1 as a way to show proof of my claim that forcing students to join an
extracurricular activity would not be beneficial. I wanted to make this revision because I wanted
to find a new perspective within myself and broaden my understanding of the argument, which is
exactly what I believe I did with this genre revision.