Category: Final Project

(Sentence-Level Error) – Control sentence-level error (grammar, punctuation, spelling)

Framing Statement – Learning how to put my own voice into my writing has made my writing much better.

Before English 110 as I’ve mentioned before I was not at all the best at integrating quotes. I also think I had a passive voice and struggled putting my own voice into writing I was turning in for a grade. I think I was in a strong place when it came to sentence structure and using commas, semicolons and vocabulary but I always believe someone’s writing strengthens overtime. One can never be too good at anything writing wise. I also said at the beginning of the year that I wanted to improve with spelling.

After English 110 I think I’ve gotten much better at integrating quotes into my writing. I also think I’ve gotten much better at putting my voice into my writing. I’ll reiterate that I think writing will always improve with practice so I’m sure my writing has improved in vocabulary and punctuation even if I can’t consciously recognize it. I would also say my spelling has gotten the smallest bit better. Typing on a computer is seeming to help me recognize words that are misspelled even when I’m spelling them so typing out papers like this has definitely been helping teach me how to spell larger words I still struggle with.

This article is to showcase the good side of social media and the fact that for many it can be an escape or a place where they feel welcome. I liked the way this article shows social media in a better light. Social media shows a lot of people perspectives they may have never considered. It can also be a safe haven for a lot of people who don’t have that safe space in real life. Yet this can also be a double edged sword with people who share the values the Westboro Baptist Church have.

sentences from essay 1

I could’ve inserted my own opinion here much better. This was after I had written a summary about Chen’s piece so adding my own voice and more in depth take would’ve been a great way to strengthen my argument.

There’s no need for us to walk through life despising the “mundane” or “routine” things simply because they’re not exciting enough; we need to make them exciting.

sentence from essay 2

I think this is a great example of me using comma alternatives and also showing how you can show a certain tone in a written sentence.

Word count – 299

(Document Work MLA) – Document their work using appropriate conventions (MLA)

Framing Statement – MLA format is very important considering I’ll probably need to use it for the rest of my college career at least.

Before English 110 I think I had a pretty good idea of how MLA worked. Although I had always been told that I needed to place author and page number like this, “ending of quote (Gardner 7).” So it was a little bit of a shock to hear author and page number is supposed to be, “ending of quote” (Gardner 7). It honestly makes more sense to me the second way so I don’t know how I never caught on but I could’ve sworn I knew how to do MLA before I got here.

After English 110 I clearly learned how to properly quote but other than that not too much has changed. I know how to format a Works Cited page and that hasn’t changed. But I’d say the practice doing it was nice considering I hadn’t done one in MLA format since high school.

Here is an example of a work’s cited page that I did:

Works cited

Chen, Adrian, et al. “Conversion via Twitter.” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 16 Nov. 2015, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/conversion-via-twitter-westboro-baptist-church-megan-phelps-roper. 

Laméris, Danusha, and Naomi Shihab Nye. “Poem: Small Kindnesses.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 19 Sept. 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/magazine/poem-small-kindnesses.html. 

Paterniti, Michael. “Eating Jack Hooker’s Cow.” Esquire, 22 Aug. 2020, https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a24131/jack-hookers-cow-1197/. 

Wallace, David Foster. “This Is Water .” Kenyon College’s 2005 Graduation . Kenyon College’s 2005 Graduation , 2005, Gambier, OH.

Works cited page for essay 3

Here is an example of me introducing and citing a quote:

 Her whole poem could be summed up as, “Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other” (Laméris).

laméris quote from essay 3

Here is another example of me using a quote:

Paterniti explains how both Jack and Bout open their doors to anyone during a thunderstorm, “When guests come through the front door of the Astro Motel, Jack Hooker will hand them the keys to one of his rooms and welcome them. Whoever they are, they’ll sleep under the same roof as Jack Hooker tonight” (17).

Paterniti quote from essay 3

For this quote, because I say “Paterniti explains” I don’t need to restate his name in the parenthesis all I need to add is the page number in which the quote can be found on.

MLA format, and proper citation format in general, is extremely important to know as it’s likely we may need to cite sources later in life and being able to properly do so stops plagiarism.

Word count – 282

(Peer Review) – Be able to critique their own and others’ work by emphasizing global revision early in the writing process and local revision later in the process.

Framing Statement – Having my peers actually comment on the way I’m writing and my ideas is much helpful tool I didn’t know I needed. Hearing how other people feel about my work was extremely helpful to know how other people interpret my writing.

Before English 110 I didn’t look too kindly on peer review. To me it was always a waste of class time that I could’ve been using to finish my essay. I never thought of it as a useful tool because all we focused on was local revision and we never gave any actual advice to each other the most we’d do would be to fix each others grammar.

After English 110 I realized just how helpful peer review could be. This class was the first class in which peer review was an actually helpful tool to me. Instead of focusing on simple grammar and sentence structure we were told to focus on the bigger picture and the ideas behind the paragraphs. This was much more helpful as I actually got feedback that would help me structure and change my essay. On top of this this was the first time I was really able to give good feedback to my peers as I was able to focus on, not sentence structure but, the ideas behind their essays. Being able to give actually useable feedback to my peers was wonderful and a good learning experience as I finally felt like I was being helpful for them.

In doing this it’s also important to be able to offer good peer review to someone else’s work. It was great to practice peer reviewing on someone else’s paper as it helped me to revise my own paper later. It was good practice as with my own paper I acted as though it was someone else’s I was peer reviewing. Here are a few examples of comments I made on a peer’s essay 3!

Being able to review someone else’s work is extremely important especially if I end up going into a field where I am around people’s research papers and need to help edit them. This practice was extremely helpful to me considering this is the first time I’ve gone through a good peer review practice.

Word Count – 403

(Active Reading) Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking.

Framing Statement – Using the annotation techniques, specifically challenging what the author is telling me, has helped me understand texts on a deeper level.

Before English 110 I didn’t think annotations were all that important. In fact I thought annotations were unneeded for me. I understood that they were important to others but I thought I understood the text well enough to not need annotations. If I’m being honest, I retain enough knowledge on each text to get by in a class discussion of it but when it came to finding quotes to use later it tended to be a struggle; especially with longer pieces. So for a while if I did make any annotations if was simply highlighting things I thought would make good quotes and that was the extent of it.

After English 110 I’ve realized the importance of annotations. I decided I was going to try to annotate the texts we were being given (on top of the fact I assumed how well we annotated texts may end up being graded but it worked out for the best). I found that annotating not only showed me good quotes but it also made me pay more attention. Questioning the text got me thinking more deeply about it; as did making text to text connections between the texts. I found that challenging the texts either lead me to have a deeper understanding of it or gave me something else to talk about in class or in my essay. I don’t use every annotation type, however, the ones I have been utilizing have greatly helped me understand texts in a deeper and more meaningful way.

These are the two pictures of annotated texts I think are my best. I have a tendency to highlight without adding accompany text to my highlights these were the pages I thought had an appropriate amount of both.

A lot of my annotations may not be the most scholarly but a lot of the time they’re what I’m thinking and feeling in the moment so it’s helpful to look back and see exactly how I was feeling. It helped me a lot when picking quotes to see exactly what I thought when picking quotes I needed for my essays. It was especially good for these two pieces as I got into them emotionally.

When it comes to reading responses I picked my Chen reading response as once again I got emotionally into that piece and I ending up using an idea from that response in my last essay.

This is a great story about how hate being met with love and understanding can change a person’s mind. However I think we have to be careful when considering stories like this. It would’ve been very easy for another person from Phelps-Roper’s church to just dismiss these people with more hurtful comments. And it could be extremely damaging to someone to be called multiple slurs while trying to explain to someone why homophobia and anti-semitism is wrong. Stories like this are very heart warming and I’m glad Phelps-Roper had a turn of heart but I don’t want individuals to make their own mental health suffer trying to make hateful individuals less hateful because of things like this. Some people take the burden of educating others too much to heart and if the person is more hateful than Phelps-Roper and more dangerous something much worse could be an outcome.

Part of my chen reading response

I ending up using this idea as my naysayer response in my essay 3. While I still wholehearted believe this my essay 3 was about educating people. I had to mention this belief in my essay as it’s one I hold however I think people who cannot educate should sit and let others do so. I like the dichotomy I created by starting this semester with this reading response and ending the semester by writing an essay about education. I think it goes to show not everything is so black and white.

Word count – 534

(Integrating Ideas) – Be able to integrate their ideas with others using summary, paraphrase, quotation, analysis, and synthesis of relevant sources.

Framing statement – Integrating other individuals ideas into my essays is an essential part of academic writing so it’s extremely important to me to know how to incorporate it into my work. Especially considering I may end up writing scientific research papers that reference other articles.

Before English 110 I struggled integrating quotes in a way that was fluent. Every time I did use a quote it seemed forced or would interrupt the flow of the paragraph that I had going. I had never been good at integrating quotes and most english classes I’ve had before have never directly helped me overcome this issue. When quotes where discussed the main focus was on finding good ones and explaining them well. I was much more comfortable summarizing the pieces we were talking about rather than pulling quotes from them as transitioning from my own voice into someone else’s has always been hard for me. I could recognize the disconnect yet didn’t know how to fix it.

After English 110 I still feel a little rocky integrating quotes into my text. However, I feel as though I’m at a place a hundred times better than where I started. Using They Say I Say has been a huge help for integrating quotes and I’m happy I’ll still have that book to use as a resource. I know I can improve much more with my quote integration but I’m better off than how I started thanks to the They Say I Say passages on how to seamlessly enter quotes into my essays.

quote sandwich probably from essay two the summary from essay 1? using the text as evidence will probably have to come from essay 1 as well consider that’s the one with scientific evidence so maybe make the summary from essay three or the quote sandwich from essay three and summary from essay two whatever’s easiest

In essay 1 using Konnikova’s article about social media effects on human interaction I used a quote from Dunbar as evidence.

In Konnikova’s article she writes about how Dunbar fears for this new generation, “Dunbar fears that too much virtual interaction may subvert that education. ‘In the sandpit of life, when somebody kicks sand in your face, you can’t get out of the sandpit. You have to deal with it, learn, compromise,’ he said. “On the internet, you can pull the plug and walk away. There’s no forcing mechanism that makes us have to learn (Konnikova 5).'” In this he’s saying that children won’t learn how to socialize and they’ll be able to simply disconnect from the internet whenever they are faced with something uncomfortable or that they don’t like.

Text evidence from essay 1

I went on to use this quote to prove my own point that he was wrong. He claimed this as a scientist but I looked at it from a personal standpoint about how it really isn’t so easy.

Then in essay 2 I used a summary of the Bloom’s text (as well as one quote) to get the point of his essay across to the reader.

However, Bloom’s article suggests that empathy and sympathy towards others can be misplaced and harmful to the world around us and I think Bloom’s takes miss the mark. He claims people’s empathy is biased and only focuses on specific people. He relates it to a spotlight in the way it focuses on one person or one problem but not all of them. Bloom makes the argument that empathy for others can do more harm than good and it can impede people’s logic and reasoning. He uses the example, “Making children suffer temporarily for their own good is made possible by love, intelligence and compassion, but yet again, it can be impeded by empathy” (4). This is just one of the examples Bloom uses about how having empathy towards others can actually be a bad thing.

Bloom summary from essay 2

In essay 3 I used quotes to strength my point and move the reader emotionally.

“…blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up” (DFW 2).

Dfw quote from essay 3

I used this quote to try and hammer my point home that education will be what bridges the divide in America. I added it in after telling my own story of coming out to my father and I think have a quote this powerful after a story like that just hits the reader a little bit harder.

Word Count – 439

(Recursive Process) – Demonstrate the ability to approach writing as a recursive process that requires substantial revision of drafts for content, organization, and clarity (global revision), as well as editing and proofreading (local revision).

Framing Statement – The rough draft does not have to be perfect and this is why revision is so important to me. Global revision allows me to get all my ideas down for the rough draft without pining over it being perfect.

Before being in English 110 revision was something I didn’t think much of. I’d skim the paper for any red underlined words and if I didn’t see any of those I considered myself to be pretty set. For longer or more important pieces I may read it to figure out if a sentence didn’t make sense but for the most part I only focused on the individual sentences. English 110 taught me this was called local revision and that it’s not the only -or even most helpful- type of revision. I tended to fuss over my rough draft as much as possible to make it as perfect as possible. I didn’t think about revising as I thought if I put enough effort into it the first time I wouldn’t have to worry about going back and redoing it. However this pressure I put on myself to make my rough draft perfect each time made it hard to actually write and ended up making my work worse for wear.

After English 110 I realized there was such a thing as global revision which is reworking the idea of a paragraph rather than a sentence. It was a novel idea for me to try and rework the actual thought process of the work rather than just the sentence structure. I had never worked like that so honestly I’ve been struggling with being comfortable writing a rough draft in which I don’t endlessly toil over it being so perfect. I’m definitely working on being okay with a shitty first draft but it’s a good work. I’m happy I’m being challenged and challenging myself to do better and try this new type of revision as I believe it’s making me a better writer. I’ve been much more focused on simply getting my ideas down for my rough draft which I think allows my voice as the writer to speak a lot better than I’ve been able to in the past.

Even though my main growth I’d say has been through global revision local revision is still extremely important; especially when considering thesis statements. To show how my local revision has grown I’ve taken my original essay two thesis statement and shown how I’d reword it now that my revision skills have improved.

I, however, believe Bloom’s take is much too harsh but DFW’s ideas about being more aware to those around us and making the mundane things more enjoyable are completely worth adopting in my everyday life.

essay 2 original thesis

Which I then changed into this:

I believe Bloom’s take is too harsh whereas DFW’s ideas on being aware of others around us and making everyday things enjoyable would be great things to adopt in my everyday life. 

Essay 2 revised thesis

There was nothing inherently wrong with the first thesis but it was wordy and could’ve been stated in a less confusing manner. That’s what I’ve done here to show how local revision can take something that looks to be fine and make it into something better or more understandable.

When it comes global revision and changing paragraph ideas rather than just sentences I think this paragraph from essay three is probably my best example. I had a tough time figuring out how to make this into a barclay paragraph and get my own ideas into the essay in a coherent manner. This is the final paragraph I decided on but the bold is added text that wasn’t in the first version and the italicized text is text or ideas that were moved throughout the paragraph to make it make more sense. The gray text is things that were in the original paragraph and hadn’t been moved.

Danusha Laméris’ poem “Small Kindnesses” is in some ways in direct conflict and in other ways in direct agreement with Michael Paterniti’s “Eating Jack Hooker’s Cow”. Laméris writes about how people are born to be kind; that deep down we all act out of kindness every day even if we don’t realize it. Her whole poem could be summed up as, “Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other” (Laméris). She talks about how people deep down really don’t want to hate each other and their small actions (smiling at their barista, pulling their legs in when someone walks by, blessing someone after they sneeze) all shows just how loving people really are. Depending on how you look at each text will depend on whether or not you see them as working for or against each other. Though much of Paterniti’s writing consists of Bout and Jack assuming they’re hated, “…he will tell you what he hates; he will honor his hate and unleash it and understand that his hate will come back on him, understand that he, too, is hated” (2). Even still I believe these texts lift each other up. The ending of Paterniti’s essay where Bout and Jack both look out into the storm and know they’re taking in anyone who comes their way is, to me, one of those moments Laméris is talking about. All the walls that Jack and Bout put up come down for a moment and show that when someone may be in need they’ll lend a helping hand. Underneath all the animosity and fear they both hold they have love for others around them. At the end of the day so long as we have that for each other I think we can figure out how to bridge any divide in America.

Essay 3 Final Barclay paragraph – Bold=added text – Italics=Text that was moved

I toiled with this essay paragraph for quite a while before deciding on these few changes as I had a lot of things I needed to fit into this paragraph but wanted to keep it light and digestible. However because of my revision tactics I wrote the basis of what I wanted to include down and continued onward. Had I not done that I may have been stuck on this paragraph for days and unable to finish the rest of my essay.

I’ll take these revision types through my life and continue to use them long after English 110 I know that for sure. Specifically the focus I’ve spent on global revision.

Word Count: 699