Learning Outcomes:

  1. Cyclical recursive changes within a piece of writing

As I progressed throughout my first essay, I neared my actual purpose of writing it. This always comes to a shock, as when I start an essay I initially have the purpose in mind, and I try to prove what I feel passionate about. Yet, as I neared the end of the essay, it became clear to me what my new focal point was. I now have experienced just how an essay can be a recursive or cyclical process as I thought that I was nearing the end, I was really just touching on what I should be covering in the beginning. To be more specific, I went through many drafting stages working towards my final draft of my first essay. Actually I created three different drafts and one outline for this one essay. I created my first draft,where I got my ideas on the page, then went through the piece and highlighted and organized all of the components to visually see what my strengths and weaknesses are in the draft and to see if it possesses a visual and content balance. After refining that draft, I proceeded to making my third draft that I went through and continued highlighting in a more indepth manner, going in and adding ‘colors’ where I needed it. Then I outlined my essay so I could see what the structure is of my essay and to ensure that it had a solid foundation. After these three drafting stages, I then wrote my final draft and was able to benefit from the foundation I created through this recursive writing process of continually re-exposing myself to my own work and breaking it apart and refining it.  In conclusion, this process of recursive writing does nothing but benefit the writing process of the piece that I was working on.  

         2. Being able to integrate ideas with those of others using summary, paraphrase, quotation, analysis, and synthesis of relevant sources

Within my first essay I used ample examples from the texts we were using to support my claims. For example, my first reference was made to Henig being “men and women are more self focused, and yet also more optimistic, no matter what” (203). I chose this quote as it helps to solidify my argument that I was fighting for within that body paragraph. My claim of that paragraph was that the 20-somethings develop personally with the acceptance of emerging adulthood into the culture. The analysis I drew from this quotation was: that as important self discovery is for an individual, if they never really have time to straighten out who they are and what they want in life, or figure out what type of person they want to be when they ‘grow up,’ they may never fully reach adulthood. This analysis is necessary to the essay as it ties both Henig’s work and my arguing point together in a manner that the reader can follow. Direct quotes are one of the most effective ways to prove that a piece of text supports your thesis/claim/argument. Other than quotation, I have worked on summarizing through the assignment where we practiced writing summaries. Within this brief learning exercise, we became aware of the importance of recognizing bias (within our own work as we summarize, and within the piece of literature that we were summarizing), the different ways of looking at the same perspective the author created, and from the specific article we were working with we grew aware of the different ways that different cultures look at the same situation/thing.

        3. Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informational reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking

At the start of this class I would approach writing this essay by deciding what I would want to create my argument off of. Then I would go through the texts with a purpose in mind and read through them again and find the quotes that are the most relevant to what we are studying or to what best matched my thesis (often they are one in the same). While reading through the articles through the first time, I was already in the habit of annotating and marking up academic/ scholarly essays as I read them. This form of note taking is a method of active reading, as I was physically highlighting sections and emphasizing important topics in the margins, via marginal commenting ( which we also recently practiced and learned as a class).  I feel that I could improve within the area of posing questions and reflection as I read the documents   

        4. Be able to critique their own and others’ work by emphasizing global revision early in the writing processes and local revision later in the process

With the editing process, I would describe my level of work to be very thorough. As I go through my own drafts and revised my errors, I always look for the biggest issues first– address those, then make the global changes necessary. After addressing the global alterations to the draft including the organization of thoughts and paragraphs, the strength of my argument, etc, I address the less vital aspects of my essay, including the presence of minor grammatical errors, misspelled words, or adding in another citation here and there. As these alterations do not really impact the entirety of the essay, that is why they are saved for the end of the essay, it’s basically the ‘cleaning up’ of the essay, to make sure it looks and sounds good. As an area to work on and improve, I need to pay more attention to the use of commas. As I read through my pieces of literature, I see that I frequently sprinkle in an excess of commas, so bringing this to my attention, will draw my attention to it and help me limit the surplus.          

        5. Document their work using appropriate conventions

Regarding proper MLA format throughout my essays, this has probably grown the most since I have been within this English class. Within my first draft of my first essay I was lacking many aspects that are components of ‘proper’ MLA conventions. This includes the omittance of some in text citations following quotations and following paraphrasing. After having this brought to my attention throughout the revision processes experienced throughout multiple classes, I now know much more about fulfilling the requirements to meet the standard for ‘proper’ MLA formatting within a literary essay. For example, I referred to the author of the piece and put their name within the parenthetical citation at the end of the sentence, which I now know is not necessary. I changed this quotation: As Henig said, “men and women are more self focused, and yet also more optimistic, no matter what” (Henig 203). To the same lead in and quotation, but instead of having “(Henig 203)” at the end of the sentence, it is corrected to just “(203)”.  

6. Control sentence-level error

 

Throughout my work writing for this class, I have definitely noticed some patterns. The first of these being, as I mentioned earlier, my love for commas. I am not quite sure as to why I ‘sprinkle’ them into my work so frequently, it could just be a bad habit that I have created, a teacher could have told me to add more commas and I took it to a whole new level, or maybe it is just because I like hitting the button, etc. Whatever the cause may be, I know that I definitely need to work on limiting them to only when they are actually necessary or needed. Another pattern that I notice is my love for long sentences and long paragraphs. I feel that this could be rooted in wanting to say everything I could possibly say that pertains to the topic within this paragraph, and this results in a paragraph that occupies an entire page. I need to work on cutting out the ‘fluff’ as I call it, and only keep what is absolutely vital, everything else is just being a distraction from whatever point I am trying to convey to my reader.