I changed the focus of this essay, Instead of focusing on what the essay made me feel, I focused on the Carson's hypothesis on why people pay attention to nature. As a result I deleted most of the essay concerning the "response" to the assignment and added a lot of my own thoughts, questions, and tentative answers. The reason why I did this was because I thought this would be a very interesting topic to write about. However, beyond that, I felt by changing the essay to something almost completely new truly shows how I have grown as a writer. Before the revision, the essay was just something I kind of wrote for the grade. If I did not have the one pager assignment, I would have read The Marginal World and not have given it a second thought. Now, I am writing to answer my own questions using Carson's idea as a spring board. I wanted to take the time to pay attention to my own curiosity and wonder so this newly revised essay is a culmination of that.

This came from a response one pager to The Marginal World by Rachel Carson. The reason why I wanted to work on this further was because I wanted to explore the reasons why we pay attention to nature.

I included this part because I wanted to be a hundred percent clear in how I felt about playing on Court Nine. I wanted to show some of the ambiguity in feelings I had towards that court and how that ambiguity made it a really important place to me. Another reason that I wanted to put this in was to thank my volleyball friends. The audience that I was writing for in this paper was my friend Danny Wu, who brought me onto his intramural volleyball team that I referenced earlier in the paper. This is my way of saying thank you for letting me be here so I could experience such amazing things on the court.

What I wanted to show the most was the journey I underwent when I played on court nine. I did not find the meaning or personality of it on the first day. If I never went back to play volleyball, I would still remember court nine as a dark soul destroying court to play on. However, as I kept playing on it, the entire meaning of the court changed. This was a difficult part to include in the essay because the change in meaning was so gradual to me. I did not notice the feel of the court changing from one week to the next. However, once I took a step back and looked at my entire experience on the court, the difference between the beginning and the end were as clear as night and day.

I included my failures on the court in the essay to show that this place is not just a "happy" place. I wanted to implicitly show that there is a story to be told even though it is not obvious. At a glance, the court itself if quite unremarkable, but it holds a lot of meaning for me because of my experiences on it. I thought the best way to show this was by writing about my own mistakes and how much that sucked.

This paragraph underwent a lot of revision. In my earlier draft, I put in a lot more details about the way the plex looked when I walked in. However, none of these details were constructive in the point of the essay. I only wrote about them to write about them. I put way too much emphasis and detail into a section of the paper that never went anywhere. I wrote about the smell, the location of the racket ball courts, a lot of repetition of the sounds I heard. But once again, after painting the picture, I never elaborated on the individual details. I never referenced them again because they were not important to the theme of the essay, which was what that volleyball court meant to me. As a result, I cut out a lot of details and I'm pretty happy with the end product.

I included this to create a contrast between some of the buildings on campus and the small dinky court I was going to write about. That is why I wrote the "formidable" Gasson Hall and the "industrious" Merkert chemistry building. I wanted my introduction to create a sense of "huh?, there are all these cool places to write about and he chose to write about a small wooden court?". By doing this, I sort of force the reader to pay attention to the how small this court is compared to other buildings, but at the same time, how this small little court is much more meaningful to me than these other large buildings. By making the reader acknowledge the simplicity of the court, I can tell my story with the court and show how meaningful it is to me despite its simplistic nature