Learning Outcome No.1:
While writing this first paper, I used drafting differently than in previous high school papers. Throughout my high school experience, drafting was more to check for local errors than to actual change pieces of your writing to better fit. We didn’t treat writing as a recursive action, it was more of do it right the first time, then polish it up for the final. Although I didn’t do this a ton in this paper (it’s going to be hard to adjust), I’ve done it more in a paper than throughout high school.
Throughout the editing process, I moved around paragraphs to try and make them fit in better ways, which required rewriting sections of these paragraphs sometimes. Below I’ll put in the links to the first and second drafts of my paper, and if you just skim through them even, you can see the obvious differences in how they are arranged. This process felt different than previous writing assignments I have had in high school, and it was at times difficult to change what I had previously written. It will be interesting to see if using this recursive writing process to edit my second prompt paper will be easier to do, now that I’ve had the experience of the first paper.
https://docs.google.com/a/une.edu/document/d/1eA-mjRN9AWo0F_5esjs_RcfvgqWOFAaMyxcmfsern7Q/edit?usp=sharing (First Draft)
https://docs.google.com/a/une.edu/document/d/1yBPDxYNX4uA6wGlBpn-V5waJUMecHFYR7xTc8Qeo75M/edit?usp=sharing (Final Draft)
Learning Outcome No.2:
In previous high school writing experiences, we were not encouraged to use other sources as much as you might think we would have been. I remember in one essay being told we only needed to use three pieces of textual evidence throughout the whole paper. Just as in the previous learning outcome I wrote for, more use of summary, paraphrase, and quotations will be a challenge to adapt to. Without this strong foundation for using evidence from the text, it makes it hard for me to find relevant quotes to use that’ll actually be helpful. Often I find myself finding quotes that don’t really push my argument forward, instead just finding space fillers that weakly back it up. Sometimes it’s just hard for me to realize when quotes are actually unimportant and should not be there versus being important enough to include. However, it has gotten better for me. In cultural anthropology, another class I’m taking, we recently had to write a paper that was a cross-cultural examination of the two cultures in our book. I found it easier to pick out specific examples to use, and was surprised to see how many citations I could see throughout the page when I scrolled (link below).
Learning Outcome No.3:
Even the process in which I read and look at assigned texts for the class is different than in ways I’ve previously looked at and analyzed texts in high school. In this class we’ve been encouraged to look at these essays as a form of conversation, and to leave small notes in the margins to come back and elaborate on later. This is different than how I’ve previously been taught to look at essays. We more just went through and looked for important places to mark up or highlight for later reference. Now, we’re encouraged to make these small notes that will later make us think deeper. We use these small notes as a starting point to lead our train of ideas. We think deeper and go behind why we made these initial comments, and what following these trains of thought may lead to for our final piece we must put together. Below is a link to a picture of these small side notes early on when we were first being told what/how to do.
https://drive.google.com/a/une.edu/file/d/0B3TIS1NpPjC1ZEJEWHRYT3BieXM/view?usp=sharing
Learning Outcome No.4:
Using peer review has been a more useful and successful process for me in this class than in high school. It’s hard for me to find suggestions to make in my peers’ writings, since I don’t know if my thinking is even correct. In high school, we used peer editing more to find local edits to make (i.e. mistakes in spelling, punctuation, grammar, etc.). When receiving the results of the peer edits, it would be a kind of, “oh, thanks for helping me use the right ‘there’,” and then just tucking it away. So far in English 110, however, the peer editing process has been more helpful. In the first round, it was helpful hearing my peers points of view on my paper. Parts that seemed perfectly fine to me sounded not as good to them, and I wouldn’t have known without hearing it from them. It also allowed me to take elements of their writing styles to include into my paper. One girl who used questions a lot to get points across in her writing made suggestions that I add some questions to help drive my point sometimes, and I thought that this intermingling of different styles was interesting.
Learning Outcome No.5:
This learning outcome has been one of the biggest changes for me I’d say. In high school, we were never really taught how to use MLA citations specifically. We knew how to build a works cited page (roughly), and how to use in text citations (even more roughly), but we never were properly taught how to do it. Occasionally we’d cover it, but it was never really a big deal. “Oh, use ‘EasyBib’,” was a common thing we heard. In English 110, we’ve received resources on how to use MLA citations both in-text, and out of text. With “Little Seagull” and “They Say/I Say”, it gives us good examples of how to cite our sources. Although I made some mistakes using some citations on my first essay, I still feel like I know it better than I did at any point in high school. I plan to use these books I mentioned to help me in the future with citations in papers.
Learning Outcome No. 6:
I’ve noticed that commas are a problem. When peer editing, both people in my group missed using commas where they were supposed to in more than one spot. I noticed this because I use commas a lot, maybe even too much. While the problem with some (such as the two peers) is not enough commas, some people (like me possibly) use too many commas. I don’t really know if I use too many, but I definitely feel like I must at times. Other than that, I made some punctuation mistakes when quoting. I guess I don’t really fully know when to put in periods or commas when quoting, but I have at least a better understanding after receiving my paper back (often times I put commas and periods supposed to be within the quotes outside of the quotes). By looking at the corrections of this on the first paper (along with Googling it), I feel as if I have a better understanding for it.
