This first essay is a creative writing piece detailing a particular experience I’ve had with writing; more specifically, my response to the letters I had received during hell week and how each one varied wildly in its details, description of events and overall tone. The easiest part by far was picking the topic, this experience popped into my mind as soon as the project was assigned. However, I sat for a long while debating what the main point of this paper was going to be. In fact, I only completed the last three paragraphs the morning of the first draft’s due date and included an entire extra paragraph that was cut out completely. I also struggled a lot with overfilling my sentences, some of which upon rereading I still notice, where I go on with comma after comma describing something. Which brings me to my biggest issue in editing. After having my paper reviewed it was suggested and I agreed to have four separate paragraphs for each of the letters in place of the two I had originally. This created an extremely daunting task of changing, copy and pasting, adding and rewording sentences all over the paper. This created what I felt was a lack of cohesion in the paper. All in all, I’m happy with the outcome of the paper, but need to manage my time better in order to allow better editing.
Daily Archives: December 1, 2015
Revised Genre Writing Reflection
For this assignment, we were instructed to write to an audience unfamiliar with whatever topic we were writing about. This put tremendous pressure on picking a genre that I was well versed in so I decided on some sort of music given my interest and familiarity with the genres and decided on doing blues rock as it presented a music type I was both familiar with and consistent enough to allow me to explain it concisely; this combination was very much opposed to my original plan to write about indie rock, my personal favorite genre, but is all over the place style and form wise. The writing skills felt fairly basic, simply connecting my points with the overarching theme, being the genre conventions of blues rock, and then connecting the points together. It was however a challenging thinking exercise. As said above, I picked a topic I was very familiar with which in the end hurt me because I needed to work in citations after the fact, causing very heavy revisions later. An important note I made for future research projects was to get my sources BEFORE writing and build my paper around them, not the sources around my paper. I relied too heavily on my own knowledge and ended up hurting the quality of my writing. This can be seen throughout the paper, mainly around the in-text citations, where I felt they seemed choppy and almost off-putting. Limited time was also a heavy influence on this paper and was definitely a lesson in proper time management. To accommodate this issue simply involves handling my other work and focusing solely on the task at hand when writing.
Introductory Essay
As the most physically, mentally and emotional semester of my life comes to a close, it is important to look back at what I did in this class, just as it was important to look ahead at what my goals were in the beginning of the semester. In my ERH 101 class, it was assigned for us to keep and maintain an online blog where we would post all of our papers and reflective essays. Among which was a ‘writer’s development plan’ in which we outlined what we wanted all of which we wanted to improve upon as writers, where I listed some of the things I sought to improve on as a writer. The largest items on my list of improvements were grammar and my ability to efficiently find a method to answer a prompt and in correcting these issues I found others with my writing process that also need to be worked out in later semesters.
Beginning with grammar, I felt like I really have not improved much; however, that was not one of the main goals of the class and was something easily corrected after having a draft reviewed. In fact I think it was even a good thing, in high school grammar seemed like the end all be all of many essays and was often a major component of my grade for an assignment, I was essentially conditioned to believe it was THAT important of a thing that I had to make special note of it. Coming out of my semester, I realize now that grammar is really just a part of cleaning up a draft and be constantly changing as you write. While it is good to know it is something that can be solved by taking your paper to be checked and not be beaten into you class after class. Regardless, grammar is still something I hope to continue to improve on and not rely so much on others to assist me with.
The other primary issue I wrote about, being able to quickly and efficiently make my point, answer a prompt and finish a draft on the other hand is actually an extremely important skill to have, especially as a rat at VMI. In this regard I feel I have improved drastically since high school. This change can be seen from my reflective essays, I never stated that picking my topic was challenging or that actually sitting down and writing out the prompt was the most challenging part of any essay. Part of this is due to the nature of the ratline of course, never before have I been so pressed for time that I had to get words on paper in a matter of less than an hour and move on to the next assignment, as well as not having the luxury of thinking about essay prompts in my head throughout the day. What really got me out of the rut however was drafting, I used to view drafts as simple busy work and I would often not do them, opting instead to dive right into an essay with everything thought out (often the night before) and be fine. With drafting however, I have a means by which I can hustle my ideas done, add things later, get it looked at and be overall happier with what I hand in because I know it isn’t just the first thing to come to mind; every line has been worked on, thought out and rethought out. Drafting is by far the most major positive change in my writing style and I will no doubt continue it through my cadetship.
As an overall writer I feel I improved, though not exceptionally, but I am happy with how my writing as progressed and adapted under these extreme circumstances. As said above, drafting is my biggest take away from this semester, however I have also started using many prewriting techniques like free writing or making paragraph points for more research orientated essays. I still have much to improve on and there are things I wished I was better at, primarily sourcing. Being at VMI where keeping proper sourcing is crucial, being able to readily find and use quotes and information from outside sources is something I need to master. This can be seen in both the essays where outside sources had to be used (the genre discussion essay and the discourse community essay). I also struggled heavily with time management and had to finish those last few edits a little too close to the time the assignment was due; however, this is primarily due to the ratline and will hopefully not continue as my cadetship goes on. Finally I need to learn how to change my tone when writing. When I reread my assignments I found that I often wrote in my own voice and never actually changed from essay to essay, even from works like the initial more creative piece portrait of a writer to the analytical discourse community essay. I also find it when rereading my research papers from my other classes as well. Being able to change up my writing style and still making it sound natural is a skill I will have to improve upon especially in other classes and write more essays with more varying standards.
All in all I feel I benefitted from ERH 101, I feel that more time could have been spent teaching more research orientated topics, as many of us in the class are humanities students and as such will be writing essays of that type far more then creative pieces or self evaluations. Also all the essays were around a thousand words and did not vary much in terms of overall form and style. I feel I would have benefitted a lot from different styles and lengths of essays even if it meant having two or three more thrown in with the larger ones. On the other hand, the temporally escape of just being able to write during the various stresses of the ratline was a godsend early on. I did not however plan to become a perfect writer this semester, only to improve, so in that regard I am content with how my writing has progressed.
Revised Discourse Community Reflection
For this assignment we were tasked with picking a discourse group, a micro-culture based around individuals with similar hobbies, abilities, interests and the like, and describe why they were a discourse group using Swale’s six defining characteristics of an interest group as a guide. I picked long distance running as mine, given that I’ve ran and loved running for going on 7 years now and have been on a team for a similar amount of time, I felt I was more than comfortable in explaining the means runners communicate, our vocabulary, or lexis, and the other key parts of what makes running its own little culture. Describing running, as apparent from above, was pretty easy and I had no problem completing the assignment block by block. It was until I realized that I lacked a central theme and that I was really only answering questions, or filling in blanks described by the rubric and not really writing anything of value at all. Essentially I had to completely rethink halfway through the writing process how to do this paper. Originally the paper was described as something I could complete, as said above, block by block; rather it was the opposite, I had to think of the paper as cohesive, fluid unit and not just pieces to be put together. So I built around the theme of cross country being quite low on the totem pole of interscholastic sports when compared to sports like football or baseball. From there, the paper meshed much better and I had a common theme to base the sections around, making my conclusion feeling much less tacked on at the end. I took away from this assignment the importance of always having theme or reason to write and not just throwing sections together and calling something done.
Revised Portrait of a Writer Reflection
This first essay is a creative writing piece detailing a particular experience I’ve had with writing; more specifically, my response to the letters I had received during hell week and how each one varied wildly in its details, description of events and overall tone. The easiest part by far was picking the topic; this experience popped into my mind as soon as the project was assigned. However, I sat for a long while debating what the overarching thesis for this paper was going to be. In fact, I only completed the last three paragraphs, arguably the most important as they tie together the paper, the morning of the first draft’s due date and included an entire extra paragraph that was cut out completely. I also struggled a lot with overfilling my sentences, some of which upon rereading I still notice, where I go on with comma after comma describing something. Which brings me to my biggest issue in editing. After having my paper reviewed it was suggested and I agreed to have four separate paragraphs for each of the letters in place of the two I had originally. This created an extremely daunting task of changing, copy and pasting, adding and rewording sentences all over the paper. This created what I felt was a lack of cohesion in the paper as a whole and even more typos as I attempted to fix them, a terrible butterfly effect. All in all, I’m happy with the outcome of the paper, but need to manage my time better in order to allow better editing and review.