Writing as a recursive Process:

There wasn’t much global revision going from my first draft of my essay to my final draft. When I met with Olivia, she didn’t have any suggestions for me besides changing around some of my sentences and adding context to a few of my in-text citations. I added the definition of social cohesion to my introduction paragraph, added a title, talked about the organization loveLife and introduced it before quoting it, and corrected some spelling errors. Besides that, there wasn’t much other revision. Something I would definitely change when I write my next essay is going more into depth with the subjects I’m discussing. This has always been a struggle for me, even in high school and has been something I’m constantly working on. I want to be careful of just rambling about stuff that doesn’t necessarily matter in my essay, but I feel like there’s a fine line between that and going more into depth after a quote an article. I would also work more on paraphrasing and quoting that. I don’t have much experience with this, so I need to work on picking out the paragraphs where I’m paraphrasing and make sure to quote that.

 

Integrating my Ideas with those of Others:

I used a lot of quotation sandwich and TRIAC paragraph structure while incorporating quotes into my essay. For example, in my essay, I used quotation sandwich here in my essay, “Because of the negative stigma around the disease the efforts to prevent AIDS aren’t actually preventing it, and this, in turn, makes it impossible for social cohesion to occur. Epstein states, “Love Life’s aim was to get younger people talking, to each other and their parents…” (111). Campaigns like loveLife who have all this money are focusing on talking about safe sex and only targeting the younger generation. Nothing is being done to actually start a discussion about the disease and the effects it’s having on people who are suffering all throughout the country.” I explained the quote I was talking about to introduce it and provide some context, then I started the quote along with where it came from and who said it. Next, I explained the quote and related it to real-world topics. I learned a lot about analysis through writing this paper, I learned how to better explain quotes and go in depth relating them to the rest of my essay.

 

Active, Critical Reading:

I think I do pretty well on being an active critical reader, when I annotate, I’m able to pick out main ideas and underlying ones and use those to find the reader’s thesis. I’m also able to pretty easily draw text to text, a world to text, and self to text connections through the topics that I read about. After reading AIDS Inc, my thoughts on the article were posted on my blog and I made a text to text connection between Hallward and her Ted talk and Epstein’s article. In my blog I posted, “Epstein states, “…HIV-positive twelve-year-old boy…challenged South African president…to do more for people living there with the virus” (118). While Hallward states, “…shame is at the heat of suffering…if we can bring it out…it ultimately becomes a source for social change” (9:20). These two quotes are connected by the same idea; suffering and shame, whether it be about mental illness, aids, or whatever, can be turned into an unstoppable political force that pushes for change if people come out and talk about it.”

 

Critiquing your own and Other’s Work:

Evaluating my own work is fairly easy for me but also challenging at the same time. I’m easily able to pick out local and global issues with my writing because I know what a good essay looks like but when it comes to the more specific global revisions, that’s where it gets tricky for me. I struggle with where I need to go more into depth and where I don’t. That’s something I still need to work on being able to pick out in upcoming essays. Below I’ve linked my peer evaluation for one of my partners.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/168UQX0yjwHKkRYyxetY_Dlyanq8imgWR6TBKu_e1P3E/edit?ts=5c5e4fc4

I evaluated her essay both on the global and local level. At the beginning of the semester, I think my global revisions of other’s essays wouldn’t be as detailed as they are now. I really know what a good thesis looks like now and where it should be placed in the essay. So that’s helpful when I’m peer editing papers because I can efficiently give that feedback. In Hannah’s essay I commented, “If this is your thesis statement, I would embed it in your intro instead of using it as a conclusion sentence.” I also evaluated her use of quotation sandwich and commented, “Maybe start out with some context before introducing the quote. Especially if you keep this quote as an intro to a new paragraph.” Earlier in the semester, I don’t think I would’ve been able to pick out quotation sandwich issues because I wasn’t familiar with it.

 

Using MLA Citation:

I think I did pretty well with my MLA citations in both my rough and final draft of my essay. I introduced the author and their work before starting their quote and then put either the time of the podcast in parenthesis that I pulled it from or the page of the article. The only thing I need to work on here is quoting my paraphrasing. I didn’t catch my mistake of not quoting my source while paraphrasing in my rough draft, therefore it carried over into my final draft, unfortunately. This is something I will definitely work on and keep in mind while writing my next essay. As far as my works cited goes, that’s something I’ve had a lot of practice with, so I’ve pretty much got it down and it looks the same for both my rough and final drafts.

 

Managing Individual Error Patterns:

As far as error patterns go, really the only ones you identified in my final draft was that my essay lacked depth and “skimmed the surface” in some areas. You wrote on my paper that this could be fixed with a more specific thesis statement and/or more usage of quotes. I know this isn’t a local revision error pattern, but I didn’t really have any of those. In my essay, I stated, “If people were to cast aside these stigmas and come together an even stronger political force could be formed, and our country would be taking huge strides economically, socially, and politically.” I could’ve gone more into depth here by explaining how this might happen and then linking it to either Hallward or Epstein and then even further explaining it. This would’ve made my essay that much stronger.

 

Learning Log for Podcast: 

Writing as a recursive process- My first draft really didn’t change much to my final draft, I only fixed a few small grammar errors and moved some sentences around.

Integrating my ideas with those of others- Nothing changed much here. I only quoted Hallward once and some rape statistics in my conclusion.

Active, Critical reading- Nothing new was annotated.

Critiquing your own and others’ works- My peer annotations pretty much stayed the same. For Hannah’s podcast, it didn’t have any huge global errors. I mostly commented on local revisions it needed like comma splicing and capitalization. I also suggested she add some more in-text citations and make more connections to add depth to her podcast.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZTz1WEtXDcrO9D8weOGQcACUx8lQFz9JNa5D6hFvanU/edit?ts=5c79630a

Using MLA citations-  Nothing changed/not used much in the podcast. I did tie my conclusion to Hallward and quote her once correctly.

Managing Individual Error patterns- Individual error patterns within my essay were mostly comma splicing. I’m still working on honing in this skill. For example, I wrote, “…and feelings, they have about what happened.” This sentence didn’t need the comma. I want to keep recognizing these mistakes and fixing them. I think re-reading my papers more would help me see them easier and be able to fix them.