Final Reflection

In my first blog post I mentioned that what I hoped to take away from this class was to write more efficiently and concisely. Also, I hoped to construct a well-written essay in a more natural way, without having to think about it as for long as I had used to. However, In my seventh blog post where I was asked to recognize areas that have improved, I admitted to changing my choice of tone used to write my papers. Because my seventh blog post was only a few weeks after this English course had started, I was not able to observe areas of improvement regarding my conciseness. But, now that I am in the home stretch, I am able to confidently say that my conciseness has grown immensely. After struggling for a quite a long time in this course, I have finally pulled out with better grades than I had started with. My conciseness has improved all with the help of changing my writing process. Now, I choose to complete my rough drafts as if they were my final paper. This gives me a jump start on my paper, as well as clear, clean, and brilliant ideas that I can apply to my rough drafts. Through the completion of thoughtful rough drafts, my papers are able to take part in an effective peer review. All in all, my new writing process has pushed me one step closer to completing concise, thoughtful, well-written essays. Through the help of this course, I was able to change many areas of weakness in my writing, those being- tone, conciseness, and my writing process.

Although I have grown as a writer, my areas of improvement are still able to grow. Like I had said earlier, my conciseness, tone, and writing style had improved. But, I am still able to improve these areas. I need to definitely further work on my conciseness. I seem to add in unnecessary words, commas, and etc., so I will continue to further improve these setbacks. Through English 101, I am confidently able to say that I am very happy with the end results of my progress. Although I am not a flawless, brilliant writer just YET, I will soon be able to get there someday.

#14 Planning for Revisions!!!!

The essay that I have chosen to revise for my portfolio is my second essay, which was to analyze an advertisement. Although there are not many strengths in this paper,the strength of my essay would probably be that I have a good start in the right direction regarding my ideas and thoughts and also, considering that I have many weaknesses, this will give me plenty of room to correct my errors, which can ultimately allow me to revise my paper as a whole. The weaknesses were that I have an ineffective organization, undeveloped evidence, and a poor conclusion as a result of undeveloped, poor evidences


To effectively revise my essay, I will continue to work off of my ideas and thoughts that I had already created, but I will start with a clean slate. I will work on ways to organize, develop, and make my ideas more concise through a period of time that I allow myself to sit down and critically think about each remark I intend to make. I will do this by separating my ideas, forming individual paragraphs for each idea, and force myself to come up with enough evidence to prove my points.  If I am unable to develop a thorough, evidential, logical explanation that explains why and how for each critique that I intend to present, then I will delete this evidence. Lastly, I will attempt to pull together my very in depth evidence into an efficient conclusion. Then, I will have someone read over my work and tell me if this essay is organized, detailed, and developed. If I fail once again, I will have my teacher help me! :)

My Fave Paper!

Of the four essays that we had written in this class, the one that I enjoyed most was the argument analysis essay. Maybe it was because of the topic?..This could be because I view marijuana as a growing issue in society and this topic interests me very much. I hold very strong beliefs against marijuana and I do not agree with people who partake in these activities.  And for myself, I could never see myself doing or trying to smoke weed. What's the point? You're only hurting yourself... and coming from someone who has heart problems.. I can just never see any good coming out of getting a high, not just for me, but anyone. So because of this topic, I was drawn to this essay because I wanted to see where this argument was heading towards because any argument in marijuana's favor, appears immoral to me. I felt that since I was writing about something that I hold strong beliefs against I was able to complete this paper without it feeling like a hassle and a waste of time.

Or maybe it was because I enjoyed critiquing someone elses work, instead of constantly having my own work critiqued. Yes, I know that my work would eventually be critiqued through peer review, but I found this essay quite enjoyable because for some reason, it always seems to appear easier to critique someone elses work other than your own. Because of this attribute, I found this essay enjoyable and fun to work on and I feel that the effort that I put forth into this essay really shined through with the result of my final grade.

Thesis: Most students, particularly those who are easily distracted and influenced from the opposite sex, would benefit from attending a single sex school rather than a co-ed school.

Pathos

-A more distraction free atmosphere- easier to focus, which results in better grades.

-A less judgmental environment/no intimidations- benefits future education(college)

-Grow in own person without influence of opposite sex- find yourself at a young, respectable age.

Lagos

-Personal experience- I explain how these benefits have helped me in college.

Ethos

-Acknowledge co-ed school benefits-avoid bias

-Add in my brother’s point of view because he attended a single-sex school as well.

-discuss downfalls- fees (tuition)

·         My most compelling evidence in my argument is my point regarding future success in later years of education.  I stated that single-sex schools bring about a judge-free zone which would benefit a student’s success in college, seeing as students will pick up pointers that it is Ok to be yourself and express your thoughts and ideas out loud. Especially in college this is beneficial, seeing as college consists of lots of critical thinking, while also participation is a huge factor in a student’s accumulative grade. I find this evidence compelling because I state a personal experience following this idea. Through firsthand experience, I will appear to my audience as that I have authority, while also that this evidence is logical.

·         My weakest evidence in my argument is the evidence regarding distractions. I stated that distractions are more likely to occur in co-ed school. While single-sex schools allow for students to have an easier time focusing due to less sexual tension, students work and grades will excel at a much higher rate. After my peer review with Channelle, she had stated that although this evidence is a good point, the way that I had worded and structured this had appeared a bit confusing. Also, although this evidence is a strong attribute, this evidence loses meaning because of organizational dilemmas. I plan to better this attribute through rewording it as I would naturally speak about it to a student in person. This is because, for most, saying your thoughts out loud will make for a more grammatically correct, stronger piece of evidence.  So hopefully, doing this little exercise will make my evidence a bit easier to read and follow along with, which will maybe in the end allow for my paper to contain strong, logical evidence through and through.

Analyzing and Writing Arguments #11

Three specific things that I have learned after analyzing the article"the $78 Million Dollar Bag" was the influence that tone, relavence, and structure had.

•  Tone- In the article "the $78 Million Dollar bag", both authors use an informal tone when trying to reach out to their intended audience. They make remarks toward their audience that were supposed to befriend them, but ultimately came off as offensive, such as "Come on, fess up most of you had probably done it last night". What I had learned from this example proves that for my paper I am able to use an informal, friendly tone, but only to a certain extent. I must make sure that I do not come off as offense, which can push away my audience. If I am aware of this problem that is  able to occur, I will be successful in attempting to write in an appropriate tone for my arguement.
• Relavence- In the article "the $78 Million Dollar bag", one huge issue regarding their arguement was the revelvance regarding their examples and facts. Throughout their paper, they had supplied a great amount of evidence that furthest related to their thesis statement that dealt with the raising of awareness of issues that marijuana is bringing around. Both authors get off track multiple times when trying to state facts and statistics regarding their thesis, which in the end weaked their argument. For my arguement, I will be sure to supply my paper with effective, suffitent, relevant evidence that will allow for my arguement to be nothing but strong.
• Structure- In "the $78 Million Dollar Bag", both authors failed at writing a well structures, organized arguement. This dilemma made for their argument to appear weak. By jumping from one point to another and then back to the first, deffinitely confuses  audiences and weakens their postion. All in all, when writing my arguement, I will be sure to write in an effective, organized, relevant manner.

Peer Review # 10

As you know, our fourth essay that we have done peer review for was a little differnt from other times that we have done peer review. This time, we met in bigger groups than normal. I feel that this method was effective because as we were organized in groups that our group members wrote about a similar topics compared to ours, this benefitted us greatly. We were able to share ideas and express likes and dislikes towards eachothers work, ultimately strengthening our final products.  Since I found this peer review method more effective than small group peer reviewing, I feel that we should stick to these methods because it inspired me to view my paper and ideas in differnt ways through the help of multiple brains coming together.

As a peer reviewer, I find it hard to be brutally honest. I always try to butter things up so that I do not come off as offensive, mainly because I do not know these students the way that I know girls that I went to high school with. However, I think that I do a good job when having to determine where more detail needs to come into play. I am able to identify when cetain statements such as, facts and examples appear as weak evidence.

I think the way that we have contructed peer review in our class is a helpful process. After writing our "first shitty draft" is the best time for us students to start the peer review prosess. However, I beleive that more often we should have bigger groups, just as we did for our third essay. This peer review process made ideas flow easier and helped many of us out tromendously. Having multiple ideas thrown at us allows a students to pick and choose what ideas best help their individual paper. Also, even though we do have an appropriate amount of time to complete our peer review process, it becomes very difficult to complete this process when only bits and peices of everyone's paper is complete. We are given enough time to complete this process, but not when incomplete work is infront of us.

Patterns of Error

Three patterns of error that I can easily identify when looking back at my first two papers written for English 101 are excessive wording, sentence fragments, and an over usage of commas.

• Excessive wording as a result of a constant formal tone- For myself, I struggle with writing in a constant formal tone when it is usually never needed. As I find myself often writing in a way that I do not EVER speak in,  excessive wording seems to be a major downfall throughout my work. I tend to add in words that literally have no meaning.  I feel that if I make my work more wordy, it will appear to my teacher that I am placing more emphasize or greater meaning upon what I am speaking of; clearly that has not been the result of my word choice.  Our first essay was a Narrative essay, while the other was an Ad analysis. Writing in a formal tone, which resulted with being excessively wordy took meaning away from my Narrative essay. Instead of my essay being written in a more personal tone,  my bad habits took away from the meaning of my paper. It sounded as if someone else wrote my paper. For my ad analysis, I tended to repeat myself over and over. I found myself just rewriting the same thought over and over but in different ways. This affected my paper because it resulted with the little evidence that I was able to present as weak. Also, in result of being excessively wordy, my work appears to drag on for too long of a time until my main point is able to be identified.
• Sentence fragments as a result of a constant formal tone- While also looking back at the first two essays that we had written for English 101 sentence fragments seemed to be a constant mistake as well. As I had already explained before, writing in a formal tone has affected my writing overall. Because I write in a formal tone 9 out of 10 times, sentence fragments are repetitively seen throughout my work. This affects my work because my thoughts never appear to be completed. My work seems to always be grammatically wrong. Because I write in a formal tone, I sometimes feel that sentence fragments sound appropriate. This is only because I rehearse my work in a different way than others.
• Commas- Personally, I feel that I use commas too often in my work. In result of this bad habit my work is often grammatically incorrect. Clearly, this results with the grammatical portion of my papers to lose points.

To avoid making these silly mistakes that can be easily fixed, I will make sure that I reread my work over and over to make sure that these errors vanish from upcoming papers that are due soon. Also, I will have either my older brother or mom who is extremely good at writing to revise my work.