Learning Outcomes 1

I have chosen to explore my revision skills within the third essay I have written. When I write my essays I tend to ignore grammar and the way that a paragraph flows. I have noticed that I have begun to pick up more on my mistakes and how to fix them as the year has progressed and as I have written and corrected more papers. Another noticeable revision that I seem to make is adding in more meaningful text based evidence into my paper after the first and second revisions. I made many global revisions, and local type revisions, because I had a very rough draft that did not have a lot to go off of except for a concept, and intro. My first draft was not alot to go off of and I had to put a lot more into the essay in order to have a good paper. The big global revisions that I had was that  I added a lot of ideas and supported them with text based evidence as well as a conclusion. A lot of my revisions tend to revolve around sentence level, whether it be grammar, rewording or deleting unnecessary words. I think that this shows that I have been able to formulate my essays better but I am lacking when it comes to adding evidence. 

Learning Outcomes 2

In the final draft of my third essay I added a decent amount of textual evidence that helped my thesis and overall the whole concept of the paper. In this paper I have used more evidence than I had in the other papers I have written. I believe that this is because I have grown more aware of how helpful text evidence can be and how much of a difference it makes in a paper. Some of the evidence I used in my paper was from Michael Pollan’s essay, “The Animals: Practicing Complexity” “ But if Joel were to cut down the trees to graze more cattle, as any conventional accounting would recommend, the system would no longer be quite as whole or healthy as it is”(324). I used this to show how that when you attempt to do too much of one thing then it can end poorly for what you are focusing on and for what you are neglecting or taking away from. This was such a subtle piece of evidence but it aided in getting my point across, because it created a connection to Pollan’s piece that my thesis and concept slightly connected with. I have gotten much better at including evidence into my papers, even if it may be something that does not seem to have much importance.

Learning Outcomes 3

The ways that I approach critical reading is to envelope myself into the reading and try to understand it the best I can. Whenever I am confused on what I am reading I start to write questions about the text and try to go back and answer it later on after I have finished reading. I have found this helpful because it forces me to go back to the text to figure out my own questions that I asked. This is the tactic that I use most often when I am annotating papers, or essays that I have to read. I find it the most effective because it makes me think about what I am reading and how I can understand more just by looking into the text at a deeper level than at first glance. I also tend to annotate things that I don’t understand too much and terms, or phrases that are repeated multiple times throughout the text. I try to pick up on the simple pieces of the text at first and then go back a second time to really dive into what I am reading. I don’t think that my methods of annotating are the best or have any validity to them, but it is what helps me understand the readings in the most effective way. I can definitely improve my ability to annotate essays and other pieces of text, but for now the way that I annotate is what helps me the most from what I have tried.

Learning Outcomes 4

I have been exposed to peer review since highschool, because I had taken a creative writing class and half of the class was peer reviews. I would like to think that I was a good peer editor in the beginning of the semester, but I have also noticed that I have gotten better at giving feedback to others. I have been more keen to spelling, grammar and local revision types of mistakes, rather than just the global revisions. For example, a lot of my editing came in how to make the pieces flow better, rewording sentences or how to make a paragraph better. However, peer review is not just about giving feedback, it is also about getting some back. In the beginning I didn’t really take feedback because I thought that my work was already good the way it was, however, as the semester progressed I became more open to taking the criticism. I noticed that many of my mistakes came from spelling, grammar and the lack of text-based evidence. I started to pay more attention to these parts of my paper, in order to make it a better piece.

Learning Outcomes 5 and 6

In my significant writing project that I have chosen I use MLA citations many times within my piece. I use many pieces of text based evidence within my essay and I cite the others of each piece whenever they are used throughout the entirety of my whole paper. In my paper I used text evidence from Michael Pollan’s essay, “The Animals: Practicing Complexity” “ But if Joel were to cut down the trees to graze more cattle, as any conventional accounting would recommend, the system would no longer be quite as whole or healthy as it is”(324). I use MLA format to cite my evidence, the author’s name is at the beginning of the quotation so I do not need it at then end with the citation, I only need the page number that the text can be found. I have gotten better at formatting citations in the MLA format as the year has progressed.