Sunday, April 13, 2008
Writing, interpreting and revising ...
To begin class today (4/14), I’d like you to reflect on last Wednesday’s writing workshop and the feedback you received on the first draft of our current assignment. What did you gain as a writer from this experience? What have you learned about doing interpretive or text-based research so far? How are you planning to revise your essay in the next week?
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Well I have learned that I'm not a vary good writer in the sense of how to make it seem like a formal paper, but I do have good points and reasoning. I do lack the scholarly citations to make it a stronger paper, but I'm working on that. I need to explain things on the paper in more detail but all in all the main thesis is ok, it just needs the "back up" to make it come out stronger.
The workshop was very helpful on wednesday. I was able to get some good feedback from people about some things I hadn't caught when I read through the paper myself. Reading aloud helped me to even catch my own errors and make notes to change how some things sound or rearrange parts. Reading other people's works was constructive for me as well. As I made suggestions for the them, I thought about the same things in my essay and was able to come up with some other ideas and ways to do things in my writing. I am going to expand my essay a bit more by adding at least one more body paragraph and by using more of my secondary sources. Also there were a few things that were confusing in my writing. I plan to go over it more thoroughly and iron out the rough points.
I really liked the feedback that I got on the first essay. Unfortunately I was only in a group of two so I only received it from one person. The formal letter is a completely new way of editing fellow students' work for me. In the past I have usually just written comments right on their first draft. The letter gives me better feedback about my draft as a whole and its key ideas rather than just fixing sentence structure. From doing the research I have not learned a whole lot that is new. If anything I have learned that the data bases through Penrose are a pain to use. It took me several hours and the sources I finally found are not even considered scholarly. I do not even have that abstract of a topic so I was pretty disappointed at how unhelpful the data bases were. In order to revise my draft I need to add in some more key points to lengthen in a bit and also put in one more cited source, which is not as easy as it sounds. For me using sources in the past was something to supplement my ideas if I wanted to. Before coming to college my teachers ususally did not require a set amount of sources if my writing was good and supported on its own. I like that a lot better because on essays like these where I have smooth flowing ideas and the research is not giving me anything helpful, why be forced to cite it in the paper? Even the first source I used in my first draft feels like I am having to force it into the paper, which I think tends to interrupt the flow immensely. I think research with in text citations should be a supplement/tool for a writer to use if they feel it helps the content of the paper.
From the writing workshop, I have gained a lot of new insight about how I should be organizing and incorporating texts into my own essay. The students that I shared my essay with provided me with many good ideas based on their own writing. I also need to be a little more descriptive in some places of my essay as well as vary my sentence length so that it is read more smoothly as opposed to being choppy and rough. From this experience, I learned that I need to read my paper out loud prior to turning it in because I caught a lot of mistakes during this time that I read over when I simply read the paper.
Through the reasearch so far, I have learned about using better keywords as well as skimming articles to see if they would fit well into the purpose of my essay. Also, I found that by not having a clear idea set in stone prior to research, this will benefit me and open up many more options than if I had my mind set on somehting specific. There is a limited number of articles that can be used on the databases so having an open mind can lead to a better essay with better examples than if I had my idea and I was unwilling to change from that.
In the next week, I plan on adding more support to my paper from my analyzed texts as well as more examples. Although I am adding all of these things, I am also going to focus on conciceness and making sure that the essay is smooth and easy to understand.
I think the feedback from the writing workshop was very helpful. Sometimes I feel like I’ve been looking at my own paper for too long and it is hard to distinguish some of the errors in sentence structure and grammar. It is refreshing to look at another writer’s paper in order to gain some insight. I think it is useful because sometimes you can learn from their mistakes and correct your own paper later, or you might be able to pick up something new that might make your essay better. It was useful to have Joe review my paper because he was able to give some very useful feedback that would allow me to see how I should re-approach writing this essay. It allowed me to see what I needed to do in order to write a more meaningful essay. I realized that my essay was very redundant and needed a lot of fine tuning…which pretty much ended up in me writing an entirely new essay that kept some of the same ideas. I learned that text-based research may be very challenging. It was extremely hard to find legitimate sources that related to my essay topic. But I also have learned how to properly incorporate sources as well as cite them. I have already re-written my essay. It is essentially an entirely different essay from my rough draft. I kept the same thesis, but approached it from a different angle. Now I feel as if the essay needs to be spiced up, and made more interesting for the reader.
When I emailed my group members my paper I was afraid that the meaning of my paper in general would be lost, as the format is somewhat abstract. The feedback I recieved assured me that my papar was not that hard to follow and that my use of parallelisim does lead the reader to certian points that I wanted to make. The feedback also highlighted my lack of textual references or textual evidence, I knew that I had not included these yet as I did not know how I was going to icorporate them but the feedback provided helped me make my decision.
As I revise my essay I am going to focus on including textual references which support my paralell 'storylines'. I think this will be a difficult task as I do not see many instances in "Ragged Dick" as having the encompassing meaning which will translate to the other storyline in my paper.
The writing workshop for me was very helpful to me because I was able to see how my writing was perceived by others. Reading my essay out loud was, although the most nerve racking, was also the most helpful. It helps me as a writer and listener hear thing that I would not normally pick up if I was just reading it silently or having someone else read it. Also, I got to hear what others thought of my writing. This was the most helpful because my group members were very open and honest about what they thought was very good in my essay and what could use some work.
The research for my essay has been going very well. I have learned many new things about homelessness and societies perception of them. Also, I have learned that interpretive and text based research can be much more helpful than just getting facts and statistics because it is a bit more personal and based a little more off of perception. I think this can be more helpful because you are then able to see thoughts and ideas working together with facts to create a more helpful source from many perspectives.
And for the final draft of my essay, I am going to have a lot of work. I am going to reevaluate my essay and my thesis in particular and focus more about Ragged Dick and less about my secondary sources.
On Wednesday’s workshop was very helpful in many ways. First of I would like to add that I have already done somewhat similar workshops or peer responses in my last writing class 1122, with the exception that we had questions to answer about everyone’s writing. I believe this was more of a challenge because I did not know how to respond to someone’s essay writing them a letter. On the other hand it was a pretty good workshop made me think of their writing and mine as well. This workshop helped me get feedback on my writing as well. For this first essay I got really good feedback and advice. The advice was not anything big like making any global changes but it could help my paper and have a huge impact on the reader. I say this because the advice given to me I asked for before reading my paper this way they my peers would know how to help me. I before reading my essay announced that I was yet not finished and that I would like help on my thesis to make it clearer.
In class 1122 I had already learned about interpretive or text based research. Yet in this class was where I learned how to look for scholarly sources on the Penrose library website. This reminds me of what I am to do for my revisions. I all ready found a scholarly source which I was missing in my forst draft. I also have found quotes for the movie Titanic.
The writing workshop has taught me to consider the reader more when writing my paper. Things that worked well for me and seemed feasible for me, was not always the case for my readers. For example, the way I constructed my introduction by beginning with a secondary source and not the primary source of Ragged Dick was not necessarily beneficial and looked upon as a good way to start the paper. This was not effective for the reader. Also, I have noticed that I have a bad habit of summarizing things to much. I do not necessarily think that the primary text of Ragged Dick should have been summed up. Although I think it was a brief synopsis of what the story was about, others felt as though it took away from the cohesiveness and the message that I was trying to convey. I would just consider the reader’s perspectives on things.
Doing interpretive and text based research has taught me that the secondary sources does not have to be directly related to the primary source. Many times I feel as though the secondary source must have the same theme, concepts, and everything else in order for it to be useful in my paper. However, that is not always the case. Secondary sources can be indirectly related. Also, I have learned that interviews are not always scholarly.
I am planning to revise my essay by looking at the flow of things such as what does and what doesn’t take away from the reader. I will look at the cohesiveness and the summarization of my primary source and consider the revision of that.
Last Wednesdays writing workshop was very helpful to me. I had only completed an outline for the essay and it was a huge help to hear what other people in the class had put together in their essays. The outline I had completed included a thesis statement and a few bulleted points for the body part of the essay. I think my thesis statement was on-track with what the guidelines of the essay are. From this workshop, I gained an understanding of how you can go about the essay in multiple ways. For finsihsing my essay, I found that I could go about writing my essay in multiple ways. I thought I could write the essay in multiple ways such as with history facts about what poverty and homelessness was like during the 1980’s or false interpretations that people view about homelessness. I thought those would be the two easiest to write about for my essay from after hearing other people’s essays in the workshop. Doing interpretive, text-based research is a lot more difficult than it seems. It takes lots of effort and re-working keywords in the search engine to find the right research information about my topic. I plan on revising my essay in the next week by first eliminating or fixing any awkward sentences and punctuation. Then I plan on adding in all of my research information and re-working my sentences a second time.
What the writing workshop did for me was to help determine if my writing was clear. I know that when I write it makes perfect sense to me, but then having other people look over it helps to figure out where I need to clarify things or go into more detail, etc. As far as doing interpretive research, I learned to get more sources than you need, just because some may not end up working in the end. While doing research I found it the most helpful to draw specific examples from the text I was analyzing to my sources that either reinforced each other or disputed each other clearly. For revisions I plan to clear things up that were confusing, and I will probably add some more points to the paper, or reinforce some of my existing examples with more research.
I feel like I've learned a lot about each of your individual writing processes, skills, and the challenges you face for this assignment. Overall, it sounds like the workshop model worked well and that the time we spent on this was helpful for you. Keep up the good work in this regard.
On wednesday, I received very valuable feedback from my two peer-editors. I Learned a large amount from Josh, who wrote me a peer-response letter. To quote his biggest problem with my paper, "one thing that the draft lacks is a clear interpretive claim." I received virtually the same feedback from Mr. Bateman and thus I have realized that I didn't really even have a strong argument from the beginning. I didn't make it clear to the reader exactly what I was arguing, and that is a fundamental flaw with the way I approach a writing assignments. Clarity is the prerequisite to communication and without clarity you have something that looks like the opposite. Josh Also suggested that I put further evidence in for my final draft, which also was echoed in the professors critique of my paper. I wound up adding another source and will now always be cognizant of justifying my arguments with thorough evidence.
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