#1
Recursive Process/Revision
At the beginning of this semester I was feeling very shaky when it came to writing essays. In high school my grades on essays were what I would call below average so that had a big influence on my confidence when it came to writing. One thing that I believed cause this was my lack of revision skills. In high school, revisioning our essay was not a main focal point when it came to English class. As soon as we began working on revisions, I realized that I was going to be a lot more comfortable in this class. After the first essay there were many mistakes and other small things that I could change. I looked further into these mistakes as I reread my paper multiple times and fixed what I thought needed to be fixed. One of these mistakes was the second sentence of the essay. At first I decided to write “Some people believe it [social media] is the best thing that happened in the world. Other people in the world believe it could lead to our downfall.” To me it felt as though this did not sound right so I decided to make some minor changes to it. I ended up having it saying “Some believe it [social media] is the best thing that ever happened in the world, while others believe it will lead to the downfall of humanity.” All in all, when it comes to revisioning, I am extremely happy to see where I am now and the incredible progress that I have made so far in my college academic career. It can only go up from here for me.
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#2
Integrating Ideas
Being able to integrate outside ideas into my own writing is something I feel as though I strive in. Since middle school, my public school system went into great depth when it came to integrating outside ideas into our essays. Examples of integrating ideas that they taught us were quoting other people’s work, summarizing parts of people’s work, and analyzing their work as a whole. Not only am I good at just integrating these ideas, I also choose ones that are relevant to what I am writing about and support what my essay is about. For example, I used the quote “It’s where we develop the capacity for empathy” (Turkle 379). This quote was from Sherry Turkle’s piece, “The Empathy Diaries.” When implementing this quote, I led into it with a nice transition so that it would flow nicely as the reader read this sentence. Not only did I make it sound right, I also added the world “conversation” in brackets after the word “it’s” so that the reader of my essay would know what Turkle was talking about. The reason why I chose this quote was because of how well it supported my argument and the thesis of my essay. My thesis statement was that empathizing is something we must do in our lives to make the world a better place and this quote exemplifies that perfectly. It shows us that when we talk to others, we become more empathetic because we learn more about them and what they have gone through.
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#3
Active Reading
When it comes to active reading, I feel like I have a good understanding of what I have to do. Middle school was the first time I was really introduced to actively reading and we were taught how to do explications. For each explication we had to do three parts: write the quote, summarize the quote, and finally analyze the quote you chose while describing it. From there I expanded my knowledge and learned more active reading strategies. Through high school and now into college I have focused on how I can actively read better than I could before. I have begun to think more as I read and it has really helped me with my writing. When beginning to read a difficult reading I will read it all the way through once and mark the spots where I had trouble comprehending. After reading the piece through I would go back to the spots that I marked and reread them until I could make sense of what the author was saying. While reading, there’s no specific spot where I am annotating, I am annotating throughout the piece. I will annotate at places in the reading where I do not understand, but also spots where I do understand what is being said. I do this so that I can see it in my own words when I go back and read over my notes. While reading our assigned pieces I would always be trying to find ways I could relate what I was reading to my own experiences or other pieces that I have read. This was something I really did during project two when talking about empathy. I feel as though I am a very empathetic person so I related to the pieces we read a lot.
(Photos can be seen under the active reading tab)
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#4
Peer Review
In my past school experiences, peer review was something that was never really taught to us, we were sent out to do what we thought made the most sense. Most people would be looking only for the grammatical and other small sentence errors while others were only trying their best to look for the larger issues such as incomplete ideas or weak thesis statements. I’m not saying these were bad things, what I’m saying is that more should have and could have been done by our teachers. They could have given us more direct instructions when it came to peer reviewing others, but I do believe that it gave us a good base for us to expand upon when we got into college. At this point in my academic career I am comfortable with my peer editing skills. After the completion of this I will have a much better understanding of exactly what I should be doing when it comes to peer editing. This includes not only the small sentence errors, but the ideas that use more thinking to notice. Throughout my classmates’ essays I gave my input on what I believed that they could improve upon. Some of these inputs I gave included small grammatical problems, parts of the essay that seemed unnecessary, sentence structure, and other supportive comments to let my peers know that they were doing a good job. Peer reviewing my classmates’ essays did not only help them, but also helped me improve my writing. While reading theirs I found some that I found useful for my own essays.
(Examples of Peer Review can be seen under the “Peer Review” tab)
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#5/6
Document Work and MLA/Sentence Level Error
I feel as though my ability to cite sources and make a works cited page is a very good tool to have. I feel as though I excel at this part of essays because it does not take much talent, and as they say “be excellent at the things that take no talent,” that is a quote that I live by. This was something we learned about in middle school and high school so that is part of the reason why I feel like I am good at it. One way I did improve upon this was with my in text citations, specifically when it came to citing David Foster Wallace’s speech, “This is Water.” I had never had to cite a speech before so this was new to me, but I figured it out and was able to do it correctly. Throughout the semester I was pretty good when it came to sentence based errors. Most of them I would come across and fix while I was reading it over but other, like comma placements, were ones that I would find as I looked deeper into my essays. Quote integration is something that I am good at but this semester I found more phrases that I could use while doing this which made my essays much better.
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Throughout these reflections I used multiple projects that I have done throughout the semester, they are linked below.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sVlcj9OM3nUOYdNRDvD9ZYNug9Xanp6ECxgy0wtWWGw/edit?usp=sharing
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-NBp57zRusyNFruOogWoLkr1NysJEJd51b3YNhe7VJY/edit?usp=sharing
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DysI17fYZtvo8kESBwAKr7QFJsZawUAGdCUnXz17IPQ/edit?usp=sharing
