Learning Outcome No.1:
When revising my second essay, I found myself using a more recursive approach than I had before. In previous papers, I used the revising process in the same way Nancy Sommers describes it in the first paragraph provided of “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers.” She talks about how many students use the revision process, “By rewording their sentences to avoid the lexical repetition.” This was the approach my high school basically taught, so English 110 gave me a new outlook on the revision process. I’ve found that seeing writing as more recursive process, focusing on global edits not just local edits, is a lot more useful than previous revision strategies I’d been taught. Rewording my essays to make them sound better probably did make them better at least a little, but not by much.
Using a recursive approach when revising papers makes a whole lot of a difference. It made it easier, in fact, to write this paper. Originally, I basically just wrote down paragraph after paragraph when the thoughts would come. I didn’t really focus much on organization, since I knew my revision process would fix up the paper afterwords. It made it easier to get all my thoughts out, without having to worry about the flow. I focused on this mainly when revising. I tried to reorganize my paragraphs to flow better. Looking down on the links below, you can see the changes in paragraph organization between the two drafts (there were too many examples to give a specific example). I tried to move the paragraphs around to where they’d fit in the best. I tried to find spots where the main ideas of the paragraph would relate to the surrounding paragraphs.
https://docs.google.com/a/une.edu/document/d/1xI8jBD8EUmGxB6If88CwM30aiOEn-1js4R6O5VdKWpY/edit?usp=sharing (First Draft)
https://docs.google.com/a/une.edu/document/d/1YE-C5dizNUZvuqX0EGXv6oMo6dFw0vue5DdqHUK7r-0/edit?usp=sharing (Final Draft)
Learning Outcome No.2:
English 110 has improved my ability of using quotes or just connecting other texts in general. A lot of the time before this class, I would use quotes to fill up space. I also found myself just dumping partially related but unnecessary quotes into the paper in an attempt to support what I was writing. I never really thought about placing quotes either. I didn’t focus on integrating or explaining the quotes I’d include.
I found an example in my second essay which I believe introduced and explained the quote I used well. “In her New York Times Magazine article ‘What Is It About 20-Somethings?’ journalist Robin Marantz Henig talks about how ‘20-somethings’ are taking longer and longer to ‘grow-up,’ and how a new life stage called emerging adulthood may help. Henig points out, ‘Neuroscientists once thought the brain stops growing shortly after puberty, but now they know it keeps maturing well into their 20s’ (204). Since the brain continues to develop into your 20s, young people are often still cognitively developing up until that age while living in today’s distracting world.” I felt like I did a pretty good job with this quote, introducing the quote with some background information about the piece it came from as well as the author. I also tried my best to explain the quote, and how it fit into my argument.
Learning Outcomes No.5 and No.6:
My second essay that I wrote for English 110 is actually a pretty good example of my learning in using MLA guidelines. In high school, MLA wasn’t a big deal at all. If we’d use it, that was great, but it was also fine if it didn’t follow MLA. Coming into this class I had really no knowledge of what was required in MLA. Some big tips I got on MLA came during a peer edit. One of the peers I was working with pointed out that I needed to format my paper differently to fit MLA. My font wasn’t the right size or style, I didn’t have page numbers, and my works cited page was down in the middle of the page (links to the first and second drafts to show the changes).
English 110 also taught me how to properly use in-text citations. I never really knew, and really messed it up in my first essay for this class when I referred to the quotes from the essays by paragraph number instead of page number.
https://docs.google.com/a/une.edu/document/d/1xI8jBD8EUmGxB6If88CwM30aiOEn-1js4R6O5VdKWpY/edit?usp=sharing (First Draft)
https://docs.google.com/a/une.edu/document/d/1YE-C5dizNUZvuqX0EGXv6oMo6dFw0vue5DdqHUK7r-0/edit?usp=sharing (Final Draft)
Learning Outcome No.4:
The link to a PDF of my peer’s first draft paper along with my peer editing comments. (You need to click the link, then click it again on the page it brings you to.)
English 110 has made me a lot better at using the peer editing process as a productive step in the writing process. Before this class, most peer editing work I had done was just basic local edits. Throughout high school we’d just basically polish up each other’s papers before handing them in, looking out for misspelled words and incorrect punctuation. This course has pushed me past the local editing stage however. Although we still look for local revisions to make when reviewing each other’s papers, it’s not as important of a step. The bigger picture in peer editing in this class was finding global revisions to make. These global revisions include ideas, evidence, and organization in the paper. Using these global revisions was new and a push for me, but I feel like I’ve accomplished being able to make these edits.
My comments 3, 7, and 11 all related to ideas in the paper. Comment 3 talked about clarifying my peer’s thesis, comment 7 talked about just clarifying what she meant in a sentence, and comment 11 talked about connecting her idea to another. While these comments relate to the ideas of the paper, comments 9 and 12 talk about evidence in my peer’s paper. In comment 9, I spoke of how the evidence my peer used as well as how she related it to the paper were successful and brought a new perspective into the paper. Number 12 was a suggestion to add a quote. Comments 4, 6, and 8 related to organization of the page, focusing mostly on possibilities to create new paragraphs (4 and 6). I also suggested moving a piece of the paragraph to make it less confusing in 8. The rest of my comments focused on local edits, deleting unnecessary spaces and fixing some words.
