- I am working to approach writing as a recursive process. I am very open to making improvements to my essay. I am aware that I make mistakes and want to do my best to fix these mistakes. I want my essay to be at its potential and I know that revising my essay over and over again is the best process to do so. For example, my sentences in my past essays were extremely lengthy. It was not until peer review that I was able to realize my sentence length was taking away from the structure of my essay. The revision of my sentence length helped to strengthen the paragraphs of my essay as well as the structure of my entire essay. I also have learned that I need to improve in analyzing quotes I use in my essays and not just summarizing them. In my revision process after peer review, I have begun to pay extra attention to my quotes used in my paper. I review my into to the quote and my conclusion after my quote. I am improving on integrating my quotes more smoothly into my essays. I also am paying closer attention to the site of my quotes and the strength of them. Overall, I am improving on acknowledging the recursive process and paying more attention to my strengths and weaknesses.
Here is an architectural draft outline I created before beginning my essay to help me with my writing and revision process.
2. I am not currently very strong at integrating authors’ ideas into my essays. I do a pretty good job of choosing strong quotes that support my ideas, but when it comes to analyzing quotes I usually end up just summarizing the source’s idea instead of integrating my own ideas that have to do with the quote I used. My writing lab instructor has been helping me with this since it is what I have been struggling with most lately in my recursive writing and editing process. I have been using the templates from our class’s “They Say, I Say” reading. They have been very assistive to me when it comes to introducing my quotes and then explaining and analyzing the quote I have just introduced.
This is a quote I used in my emerging adulthood essay towards the beginning of the year. I should have summarized this the information in this quote instead of using such a long quote from King’s speech. Having too much of my essay as quotes from other writers can make my piece of writing seem weaker. Also, if I had really wanted to use this quote than I should have converted it into a block quote due to its excessive length.
3. At the beginning of the class, I was already pretty skilled at critical reading because I had done a lot of practice with it in my high school AP Literature and Composition class. I am good at extracting underlying meaning in pieces of writing. Annotating doesn’t necessarily aid my critical reading process. Annotating distracts me from the initial reading of a piece. I do most of my thinking and analyzing of texts in my head, that strategy just works best for me
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Here is a page I annotated from Robin Henig’s emerging adulthood essay. When annotating, I don’t get too into detail with my marking. I usually tend to just summarize what each section of the writing is about so when I go back to remember what the writing was about or if I need to use the writing as evidence in a piece of my writing I can easily skim it over and go back to a certain section I was interested in.
4. What helps me most when suggesting helpful global edits to my peers, is looking for a thesis and a strong structure when reading their essay. I pay attention to the main points they make and how well they support them. I find that the strength of the structure of the essay is the key aspect of where global edits need to be made. Improving on even the smallest aspect of an essay’s structure, can greatly improve the entire overall strength of my peer’s essay. So, I pay most attention to these details in essay structure in order to help my peers improve their entire essay strength.
Here is a link to one of my peer’s rough drafts that I left comments on, both global and local:
5. When citing my sources, I have found the most useful tool is the templates given to me in the Little Seagull handbook. The other aspects of MLA format I already am well skilled at because I had to become familiar with them in my AP classes in high school. The Little Seagull handbook also helps me identify which type of source I am citing, which is extremely helpful. I’m not always very strong at identifying which type of source I am citing, but my writing lab instructor is helping me identify them and I can tell that I am improving.
Here is a works cited page from one of my essays I wrote throughout the course. My writing lab instructor tweaked this page a little before I passed in my final draft, but besides one or two very detailed errors I got this correct on my first attempt.
6. My grammar skills are very developed already. I am very good with spelling in my writing and almost never have any spelling error, especially in today’s time with the constant help of our computers and spell-check. The only thing I scarcely struggle with is the abundant use of run-on sentences. Peer review is what really helped me realize my errors when it came to sentence length and run-on sentences. I’m not very good at realizing when my sentences and wording are confusing because it is very easy for me to read and comprehend my own thoughts, since they are my own. I feel like some cases of revision simply require the eyes and comprehension of an individual besides yourself that can tell you clearly when something in your essay is confusing or could be stated stronger and more clearly. I would like to develop my grammar skills even further, in order to sound even more skilled in my writing pieces in the future.
