Month: December 2017

Learning outcome 1 

As a student, when it came to revision, it was definitely not my favorite thing to do. Previously, I was more of a “one and done” type of person. I was not alone in this aspect, although. Many students, when hearing the word revision, would sink down in their chairs and groan and then wonder why all of this was necessary. In Nacy Sommers’ selection about revision strategies, she talks about the differences between student writers and experienced adult writers. She states “Such blindness, as I discovered with student writers, is the inability to “see” revisions a process: the inability to “re-view” their work again, as it were, with different eyes, and to start over… The students have strategies for handling words and phrases, what they lack however, is a set of strategies that help them identify the “something larger” that they sensed was wrong and work form there”(1). Being a student, I have definitely struggled with this. I was always so focused on what I now know as local revision that I did not realize how important global revision was. This class has taught me to pay more attention to the global revision of my paper instead of the local. By the time I was editing my last draft of my final paper, I had begun to realize that if I did not used the strategy of global revision, my paper would have been a jumbled mess. I had noticed myself completely rearranging my paragraphs and changing the theme of my paper completely. I was able to do exactly what Sommers said and look at my paper through different eyes and realize what my biggest mistakes were.

Learning outcome 2

In my significant writing project, my sources were extremely important for my thesis and claims to be supported. The source that I chose I found through the library services. The library is extremely helpful when trying to find sources that are credible considering it it hard to find sources that we think are credible through the internet. The article that I chose was about internet addiction. The author talked about what an addiction consists of. This can connect back to Bill Wasik’s article when he talks about boredom. Here is an example directly form my paper of how I connected these two articles together: “when all of our interactive technologies – video games and mobile devices as well as the web – have kept those of us most boredom-prone from generally thinking, as we might while watching TV, that we are ‘doing nothing’, even if in every practical sense we are doing precisely that” (475). This idea of feeling a sense of accomplishment by doing nothing of meaning or purpose is the perfect example of how the use of technology can lead to addiction. This helps me to support my claim that the dependence on the internet can lead to addiction.

Learning outcome 4

My peer review strategies included global and local revision. When I first started peer reviewing, I used to only focus on the local revision. In the beginning, it was hard for me to try and focus on the global part of the revision. There were points where my professor had asked us to focus only on the global revision but I kept finding myself trying to fix the local parts. As we kept peer reviewing throughout this class, I learned to find a balance between the two. Not only has this allowed me to help with my peers papers, it now helps me when I am going over my own paper. Overall, learning about how to globally revise has positively benefited me and will be beneficial to me in all of my future writing.

Learning outcomes 5 and 6

MLA formatting has always played a large role in my significant writing projects since high school. Because of this, it makes it much easier for me to cite my sources having done it for so many years. It is important to get the MLA formatting correct because if there is a mistake in a citation, it can possibly lead to plagiarizing. Local revision has always played a role in my papers as a student. As a person who enjoys grammar, I always try to make it a point to make mine correct. Although we all make mistakes for the most part, I try avoid the small mistakes like grammar.

this i believe

The paper above was written for my first year experience class. This class is meant to help us transition into college and learn more about ourselves. This paper is called “This I Believe” and is a popular prompt among students. The title is fairly self explanatory, you are to write about something that you believe in. When trying to write this paper, I had a really difficult time figuring out what I wanted to write about. To begin, I started to make an outline. Being in english class this year has taught me the importance to outline what I want to talk about and to make sure I get all of my ideas down. As I was finishing up writing my paper, I began to realize I was going in a completely different direction that I had originally thought. Without learning how to globally revise, my paper most likely would have been a mess. Before this class, I had never really paid much attention to global revision, instead I focused on local revision. Now I see how important this revision strategy really is and I plan to apply this to all of my writing in the future. Going along with global revision, I released how important it is to make drafts. In high school, I used to make one draft and pretty much be done. Now I realize how important it is to do more than one draft. To be honest, I feel like my papers could have improved even more if I had done more than two drafts. I found that eve just reading over my paper quickly allows me to find my weak points that I need to fix and also find the strong points that are focal points of my paper. Steven Pinker’s essay “Why Academics Stink at Writing” talks about wording in essays. “metadiscourse—verbiage about verbiage. Thoughtless writers think they’re doing the reader a favor by guiding her through the text with previews, summaries, and signposts. In reality, meta​discourse is there to help the writer, not the reader, since she has to put more work into understanding the signposts than she saves in seeing what they point to, like directions for a shortcut that take longer to figure out than the time the shortcut would save(5). I agree with Pinker that this can be a problem. I tend to find myself doing this a lot. Sometimes I feel like I am adding words just to add words. I think it is more important to focus on what you are writing about instead of going off to explain things that aren’t necessary.