Mixing it up

Today I was challenged with picking apart my writing and really get down to some tough critiquing. But like most people I felt that there was nothing that I needed to change or could change because I had good flow, great quotes and a very engaging introduction. However, as I found myself cutting my paper up by paragraph and narrowing down quality information, I discovered I had a lot of information that was not relevant to my topic. The following questions were posed to us:

Experiment with the order/structure of your paragraphs. Try at least two different setups.

1.) How are they different? What did you learn?
    - I tried reorganizing the structure and came into contact with a different flow I was not expecting with the first draft. I believe I may have found a new way to introduce the topic without losing the creativity and purpose. When I did it a second time I felt that there were big gaps in some of the sequences, it was okay, but I felt that the audience would have gotten confused if I had left it that way.
    - I learned that there is another to break down and look at a paper. This perspective helped me to realize that I can change up the order after I have already written the draft. Also I feel that this technique has helped me to see it more from an outside perspective.

2.) How did this whole process help you re-see your essay?
    - I was able to break my essay down part by part and decided what information was actually worth keeping and what needed to either be reworded or tossed out of my essay. Then even taking time to reorganize the structure was beneficial because then I could see if my thought process could/would flow with the same information out of order. I have never taken the time to see it from that kind of perspective.

I found these techniques to be very beneficial to understand how my audience would come to understand my paper and react to it. Now that I have trimmed it up some more I feel that I will be able to write something of quality and be useful in gaining a better understanding of my topic.