1. Writing as a Recursive Process

Instead of having my paper reviewed by a small group like last time, my Rough Draft of Essay 2 was looked over by the entire class. This meant I got far more feedback, both positive and negative.  My teacher, Ms. Amoroso, complimented me on my transitions, naysayer paragraph, and connecting my thesis to current events.  Many of my peers simply thought I did a good job overall and felt I made my point in a very interesting way.  However, there were issues dealing with confusing phrasing, not explaining quotes thoroughly, and connecting back to the Civil Rights Movement, among others, which I addressed in my Final Draft.  I highlighted in the final draft what I changed or added, and the phrases highlighted in the rough draft were eliminated altogether in the final one.

I performed some local revisions with paragraph transitions, such as changing the wording of the introduction to my paragraph on how social media impacts the spread of new habits (the Final Draft’s sixth paragraph).  I also did a bit of formal rephrasing when I rewrote “MLK” as “King,” and “VA” as “Virginia.”  Nothing major changed about my citations except the way my “Works Cited” page was indented, and there was little punctuation revision.

The majority of my revision concerned global areas.  First, one student pointed out that I didn’t define “strong” and “weak” ties, so I placed these terms in brackets next to their definitions in my introduction’s quote. I also added that social media specifically aids the growth of movements in my thesis.  Another change I made was dividing my weak ties paragraph into two, one paragraph on how weak ties bring new information, and the other on how they facilitate peer pressure, while connecting the latter to the Civil Rights Movement.  There was also a long sentence about Epstein in paragraph four of the Rough Draft that I broke up.  I performed more drastic revisions too, such as changing which example I used from Duhigg of how peer pressure can be good, from his story of peer pressure causing African-Americans to join the boycott to it pushing white students to participate in “Freedom Summer.”  The biggest change, however, was incorporating quote explanations that I’d left out previously in paragraphs 3, 4, and 6 of the Rough Draft. From this thorough editing, I’ve learned that since writing Essay 1, I’ve improved in “balancing my words with those of others,” and my punctuation use is better, but I still need to break up long sentences and must now remind myself to use the quotation sandwich more.

2. Integrating My Own Ideas with Those of Others

In the last edition of my Learning Log, I mentioned that while I did use quotes effectively in Essay 1, I often overused them and drowned out my own voice.  I received no comments on this lack of balance on the Rough Draft of Essay 2, suggesting that I’ve greatly improved.  While still writing the Rough Draft, I certainly attempted to be more conscientious of this by not devoting entire paragraphs to just background on the texts, and this appears to have paid off.

But what about how I incorporate these quotes?  Before this class, I hadn’t heard of the “quotation sandwich,” yet I’ve partially practiced this strategy before.  I’d never written a dropped quote, always citing the source beforehand,  but I had left out quote explanations and used “said” instead of diverse signal verbs.  Examples can be found in my Entry Essay, written before I learned of these methods.  After reading “They Say, I Say,” I thought I’d caught on to these concepts, which are exhibited well in my blogs and Essay 1.  Unfortunately, it seems I may have temporarily returned to my old ways, as I left out some quote analysis in the Rough Draft of Essay 2, which I mentioned in the previous section (I did maintain a good signal verb variety though). Strangely, I created the sandwich correctly in the blog that was the basis for my essay, such as when I wrote “Duhigg concludes, ‘For an idea to grow beyond a community, it must become self-propelling.  And the surest way to achieve this is to give people new habits that help them figure out where to go on their own’ (100).  Once people know what to do, they feel more confident in leading the charge themselves, and others will follow suit.”  I used a good signal verb and interpreted the quote there; perhaps I didn’t always do so for Essay 2 because I felt that the quotes didn’t require explanation.  Whatever the case, I’ll always make sure to “make the sandwich” from now on, so I won’t have to be corrected in the future.  Since the analysis does appear in the second paragraph of the Rough Draft as part of the TRIAC method, however, this problem didn’t permeate my entire essay.

Barclay, conversely, was portrayed quite well in Essay 2, in my opinion; a good example of this is seen in the Final Draft’s seventh paragraph.  Again, once I’d learned of the concepts I caught on quickly, as evidenced by my first use of the formula in my blog “How Vulnerability Becomes Strength,” although in this area I’ve kept it up pretty consistently since the beginning.

3. Active, Critical Reading

I must admit that I’m not a huge fan of annotation, as it takes extra time to summarize, think of questions, and make connections to the text.  I do understand its importance though, and I’ve found that making those connections and summarizing while reading the texts can help with essay writings later, as revealed in comparing my annotations of “From Civil Rights to Megachurches” (the right page shown below) and the content of the “The Power of Habit: Connections and Comments” post.  My annotation style hasn’t changed since starting this class; I’ve always highlighted/put quotation marks around words and sentences I believe are important, underlined unknown terms, paraphrased, commented, and connected in about the same manner.  A few of my annotations are exhibited in the following photos, the one on the left of Hallward’s TEDx Talk (the first annotated writing we looked at as a class), and the second, as I said, showcasing some of my annotations of “From Civil Rights to Megachurches,” one of the selections we read to assist us with the writing of Essay 2.

As you can see, I’ve done all the things mentioned above in order to annotate both writings.  I wrote in the first Learning Log that I “believe[d] I need[ed] to ask more questions and make more text-to-text connections between the different articles we’ve read in class,” and since then I’ve met those goals.  I think I’m in a good spot with my annotation skills.

4. Critiquing My Own and Others’ Work

I always review my rough drafts multiple times, asking myself questions about my clarity, phrasing, and spelling/grammar/punctuation.  Evidence of my own concerns before my peers’ comments can be read in the Cover Letter of my Rough Draft of Essay 2, and the revisions I made without others’ prompting, such as my thesis rephrasing, are seen in my Final Draft.

Concerning my comments on the work of others, my suggestions have changed quite a bit from the Entry Essay to this point.  The first essay I reviewed was Taylor Maloney’s Entry Essay, in which most of my comments were just on word changes and punctuation.  There were only a few comments involving global revision, including one questioning where her thesis was, and one arguing that one of Taylor’s statements on a source, “Nussbaum believes that it is a tradition in the U.S education system for people to get the higher education that is needed,” is not explicitly supported by the source.  Since then, for both essays 1 & 2, I’ve been working on suggesting more in the area of global revision by asking more questions and even providing specific examples of what to say.  For instance, in Bailey Hughes’s Rough Draft of Essay 2 on how the Internet has impacted the fight for women’s rights, she writes, “Women continue to be taken advantage of both sexually and non-sexually as the days go on.”  Since she doesn’t explain this sentence further, I ask “How are women taken advantage of non-sexually?”  Another issue I remarked on was Bailey not connecting sentences back to her thesis, a problem I recall having when writing Essay 1.  I mention my thoughts on the problem when I comment on the first sentence of her fourth paragraph, and even offer a way to reword the sentence to help it better fit with the thesis.  All in all, I think my critiquing of others’ work has become more thorough since the beginning of this class.

5. Using MLA Citation

I’ve already asserted that I always cite my sources.  In addition, I make certain to have a works-cited page for every writing I do.  I’ve used the MLA style before, but couldn’t recall the exact format while writing my Entry Essay, so I did my best to approximate it.  After writing the rough draft, which included a citations page, I had to be reminded by Abby Davis to include the parenthesized internal citations too (I did put informal references to my sources in the paper, like when I wrote “Barnett says”).  Since this incident, I’ve made sure all my quotes are followed by these citations.

“The Little Seagull Handbook” has greatly helped me with my MLA formatting.  Obvious differences can be seen between the citations of my Entry Essay, which I completed before reading “The Little Seagull Handbook,” and Essays 1 & 2 written afterwards.  My internal citations have shortened since I don’t incorporate source titles or the word “pgs.” anymore, nor do I restate the author’s name if it’s already been cited before the quote.  My bibliography citations, in contrast, have expanded to include additional contributors besides the author(s) and edition numbers, among other details.  There were some issues with the bibliography page of Essay 1, because I entitled it “Citations” instead of “Works Cited” and formatted it as a bulleted list.  I didn’t do that for the Rough Draft of Essay 2, but I did indent the references incorrectly, so I revised that for the Final Draft.  Other than these formatting problems, though, I’m doing well in this area and am currently working on memorizing the exact way to write the “Works Cited” entries so I don’t have to continually look at old examples.

6. Managing Individual Error Patterns

I’ve never had a problem with fragments, comma splices, or run-on sentences.  Unfortunately, I have had trouble in the past with inserting too many commas and semi-colons, and in fact, the comma problem did appear at the beginning of paragraph four in the Rough Draft of Essay 1.  Due to this, I made a pact to resolve these punctuation issues when I review my drafts. I’ve been going back and tallying up the commas and semicolons in paragraphs, then finding ways to eliminate them.  Since I didn’t receive any comments on these problems during the peer review of my Rough Draft of Essay 2, it appears my strategy is working.

Once Essay 1 was complete, I mentioned that I felt I had trouble with sentence length and repetition of transition words.  In my entire Essay 2 Rough Draft, only one long sentence was pointed out by my peers and teacher: “Dr. Helen Epstein, author of the book The Invisible Cure about the issue of the spread of AIDS and the stigmas against its victims that come with it, actually mentions how peer pressure can reinforce stigmas and ignorance, as she complains that the reason South African teens don’t care about AIDS sufferers is because [quote],” the sentence introducing Epstein in paragraph four.  On the other hand, nothing was said about transition words at all.

As I established in the section Integrating My Own Ideas with Those of Others, I did leave out quite a few quote explanations, which I discovered during peer review.  Therefore, while my goal of cutting down punctuation and similar transition word use, as well as sentence length, has been met, I now need to direct my attention toward the new goal of including quote analysis.

 

Notes: Exact quotes too long to include were replaced by [quote].  Their citations can be found in the works for which I cited them.  Special thanks to everyone who reviewed my rough drafts and who allowed me to review theirs.