Chainsaw Revision

Today's assignment involved literally cutting down my paper. I took scissors (sadly not a chainsaw) and cut my paper apart paragraph by paragraph, then I sorted the paragraphs by their relevance to my paper's thesis. When I learned what we were doing for our assignment I was happy because I knew that it would help me to know what I should remove from the paper. I discovered that although most of my paper was relevant to my thesis there was quite a bit that was just interesting facts I had found. My paper looks much different now, in fact most of one of the sections is gone. Even still I had many more paragraphs in my keep pile than not. Over all I learned that taking time to view each section apart from the others is a very helpful activity, it helped me to see the actual relevance of each part. I also found that it is really hard to decide what should go and what should stay; after all, I only included information I thought relevant.  Now, deciding to get rid of some was like admitting I had been wrong, necessary but difficult.