Before this class I would write a paper and then wait a while, go back to it after a day or two and do local revisions then pass it in. I would not do any global revisions at all and only fix the small things like spelling mistakes or grammar issues. But now I do a global revision before I do a local revision, at two separate times never at the same time. As seen here in my writing I changed my concept and approach from: to this: I hope to eventually get to the point where I revise multiple times before sending in the paper, doing global revisions enough until I don’t wish to change any more of the writing. I now understand the importance of global revisions to my paper, sometimes I would write something that I thought at the time was logical and fit in with the rest of the paragraph that I was writing. But then I found that when I went back to revise it did not fit in with the rest or required its own paragraph so I could talk about this new topic.
I have been pretty good at summarizing other people’s ideas and thoughts, I learned how to introduce a quote pretty well. But what I need to still work on is the analysis of a quote, how to completely dissect the quote into the bare bones and use it to help my argument. However sometimes I need to fix how I analyze a quote as I did here, from: So the solution to this issue is not to talk and fix it with those involved but those who are not supporting them. to this: The concept that is trying to be made is that everyone in society is involved in the future and creating a new life narrative, the older generations are making it hard to progress with their noncompliance. But by recognizing a need to change like that I was able to become less harsh on my interpretation of the text and created a more cohesive argument that was clear and less biased. Quotes are probably one of the strongest writing skills I have so I do not believe that I have to change that much about my writing, just simply more revision of my writing will help me change for the better.
Active reading and critical reading have been a part of my English repertoire for a while since I first learned them a long time ago. They are very useful skills when it comes to writing papers that require quotation from other people’s work. Analyzing the reading to find the ideas and pinpoint the part where they talk about it specifically is important to creating an argument. Using critical reading you can find out what the author is trying to say and use it to your advantage either as a way to support your argument or to discredit theirs depending on you use it. I want to be able to get better at annotating the readings, being able to write things that are important to the reading while I am reading it so when I go through I have written down places that I now keep spending time trying to find every time I want it.
I have been trained pretty well in MLA and we as a class have worked hard together figuring out how to write works cited for the work we have already done and the sources we are supposed to use. However, one thing we have not worked on at all is using sources from our own repertoire, not using the same two sources as everyone else but going out there and using sources that were not a part of the required sources so that we may customize our sources to the argument that we are trying to present. We have not worked on also, the small little things of MLA such as where to put the period at the end of a quote or all the little things people forget like page numbers and works cited or the proper list of things at the top of a page. I also want to learn how to better create a works cited and make sure that it is annotated correctly.
I feel that the only issues I have had with grammar and punctuation and spelling was with things that have been controversial and different from teacher to teacher. Like when it comes to where the period goes at the end of a quotation I learned differently than what we are taught here and also when it comes to contractions I have always been taught that contractions are fine, they are a part of English vernacular and used so much in our current day and age that it should not be a big that someone uses it’s instead of it is. These are the majority of the mistakes that have been found in my essays but there are the few spelling mistakes. The mistakes that I glazed over in my first write of the paper but are caught when I get to local revisions so they are not an issue when it comes to the final product. In this case I do not need to learn more to fix my writing, spelling has always been a strong suit of mine and I don’t believe that I need to work on it more than I already do constantly.
