Control sentence-level error (grammar, punctuation, spelling)
One of the things that I have mentioned in the other Learning Outcomes pages was that I tend to write very fast and miss a lot of punctuation, grammar and I have a few sentence control errors. I have tried to slow down a bit and now I try to re-read multiple times because re-reading once does not help catch all of the errors that are in the paper. I often skimp on details which causes a lot of confusion throughout the paper. Now I find it much less confusing for the reader and myself if I look over my work more to find any little errors that I may have missed a few times before. Towards the end of the semester my paper had less grammatical errors and more sentence control errors and like I said, to fix that I just need to read more carefully to make sure nothing is confusing in my final papers.
Paper 1: I did not have many spelling or grammar errors. The only thing I need to work on would be to add more to my ideas when explaining and making sure that I start my introductions to paragraphs better.
Paper 2: I again did not have many sentence errors. The one thing I need to work on still in making sure to diligently read out loud to catch any grammar mistakes and sentence structure errors. Also to make sure I am using the correct punctuation when introducing a quote.
Paper 3: I didn’t have many grammatical errors in my paper, but mostly just the fact that I need to make sure my sentences connect together and aren’t so confusing. This screenshot shows a part of the paper where I was trying to explain what Munchausen’s disease is as briefly as I could, but didn’t work out so well.
Document their work using appropriate conventions (MLA)
Throughout the semester I have learned how to properly use MLA format in my writing. In the screenshot below for paper 1, I was a little confused on the formatting for in text citations still because I wasn’t taught much about the citation formats in high school. I started to get the hang of it towards the end of the semester, but still had some issues on my works cited page although I don’t know what I need to fix considering all it says it needs work and that it needs to be on a separate page which it was. I think I need to look up some different methods on how to properly cite in MLA and other formats so that in the future if when I write other papers that doesn’t take points off since it should be something very easy to accomplish. Another thing I am still confused about was from paper 2 to paper 3 I changed the things that I was asked to do in the comments, but they were still wrong. I wasn’t sure, like I said about the formatting because it’s a very vague comment. I’m guessing it’s the font or just the citations in general, but again, I’m going to have to look into it some more.
Paper 1: I had some formatting issues in within my paper while using quotes. I did not use correct MLA format after introducing the quotes. Next time I will just write the authors last name and not the date as well so it follows the MLA format.
For my works cited I followed the MLA format, but centered the whole thing instead of just the title.
Paper 2: I corrected the issues in the second paper with the formatting of MLA within my paper. I still need to work on the formatting of my works cited page by making sure it’s on it’s own page and the formatting of it. They cannot be centered which they are so next time I will make sure they are not.
Be able to integrate their ideas with others using summary, paraphrase, quotation, analysis, and synthesis of relevant sources.
In paper 2, I used quite a few quote sandwiches to introduce what evidence I am using and then backed it up with my own thinking and rationale. The quote sandwich I chose to highlight in paper two was:
Most people in society today do not like to point out disabilities in fear of being rude or offensive. However, the offensive part is still happening just in a more concealed way. The article “We’re 20 Percent of America, and We’re Still Invisible” explains, “At screenings of the Netflix documentary “Crip Camp,” at Sundance, audience members often asked why they had never been told the story of Camp Jened for young people with disabilities in the 1960s, and of the activism many of the campers pursued in the disability rights movement as adults. One theory is this: They didn’t want to know.” (Heumann and Wodatch). People in society do not want to recognize disabilities because they do not seem to care about it unless it affects them directly.
This quote introduces a key concept about how people treat others that have disability in society today and why they might be like that. The quote contradicts what I explained about how people think they are acting around them, but the quote explains differently about how people with disabilities don’t need to be treated any differently than others and this mainly happens because most people don’t take the time to actually understand their disabilities and what they are still capable of. Most of the time they don’t want to be treated differently just because of the label that they have. My thinking at the end justifies that most of the time when someone has something like a disability, no one really cares to either get to know them or understand their situation so they just ignore it.
Before this semester of english, I usually never introduced quotes as much as I do now. Most of the time I would just throw quotes in my papers after just explaining a previous quote so there was no lead up or introduction of what I was going to be talking about next. I also had a hard time connecting my quotes to my thinking in papers. I knew what points I was trying to prove, but the evidence that I chose was too difficult for me to connect them all together. Now I tend to look for evidence from different sources that connect to my main thesis and all of the other evidence that I incorporate into my papers. That way it makes it much easier for me to think critically about my evidence and the overall message of my paper.
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).
English 110 has taught me many things about my writing habits that I had practiced before. I noticed a lot of times that I tend to write whatever I am thinking down on the paper which can get confusing for me and the reader which carries over into the final draft. I also had never kept my copy of my draft the same and would change everything on my draft to become my final paper. Now when I am writing my papers, I keep the final draft separate and make comments instead of changing everything around before I am done with my final paper so that I can lay things out much easier and where I was trying to come from initially. Something that I often edited in my papers this semester were whole paragraphs to help with the flow of the paper and also some key concepts that made sense to be introduced earlier or later in the papers. In paper 2, I moved a whole section of my fourth paragraph farther up to introduce one of my bigger ideas so that it would introduce the rest of the paragraph better. The quote below is the section that I moved up in the paragraph. This semester has shown me that I don’t always have to start completely over when the flow of my paper isn’t coming together, but rather switching up the organization can do a lot for the end product.
This can change the way children see the world while growing up especially if they are not exposed to many different kinds of people. The article “Want to Be Less Racist? Move to Hawaii” by Velasquez-Manoff suggests that when being around people of so many different religions and heritages causes a more open minded view of the different backgrounds and diverse lives of everyone around. Velasquez-Manoff provides a good inference about why we might do so much covering and excluding, “We’re group animals. We instinctually divide the world into “us” and “them.” Groups compete with one another. They invariably enter into conflict. Even chimpanzee “tribes” wage war with one another, after all. We’re thus doomed to look down on people we’re not familiar with — to “otherize,” in modern academic jargon, those who don’t look or speak like us.” (Velasquez-Manoff).
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.
Throughout this semester I actually feel less confident in peer review than I ever did before. I felt as though any time I made a suggestion it would get shut down because it wasn’t following the guidelines of peer review and they were too harsh. I personally think that peer review needs to have a little constructive criticism because it helps the reader see the different points of view. I still don’t understand the revision worksheet thing with the global and local revision which probably makes sense as to why my comments were incorrect peer review criteria. In high school I got a lot of positive feedback from my peer review comments and I tried to give a lot so that the writer had more to think about whether they added what they think about my suggestions or not. I also think my papers this semester were not very good because the feedback I got was very minimal and confusing to me. In Paper 1, I made many in-depth comments on Faye’s paper so that she had quite a bit to work with to make her final paper that much better.
Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking.
Throughout this semester, I think my active reading has gotten much better considering I would re-read my work often to make sure everything made sense. Also I would re-read to make sure the evidence that I was using was actually relevant to the point I was trying to get across. A lot of times in my drafts, there were multiple grammatical errors because I wouldn’t re-read them before. One of the things that I also had to work on was making sure my annotations of the articles made sense in a way that I could make connections to real life or to other peoples lives when relating to the articles and readings from class. Before this course, I often read and annotated in a very lazy way which would make it very difficult to understand the main idea of the text and then translate into my own words. One of the things I learned from this course was different ways to go about my annotations, meaning I needed to think about them from different perspectives. The material that was given had to be annotated from different angles to get the most out of them and that made me realize how much I can really get from thoroughly reading and thinking. Because I am able to open up so many paths of discussion from my annotations, it makes me that much of a better thinker, writer, reader and listener. Writing the blog posts has also helped me tremendously in the aspect of understanding my annotations further. The blog posts allowed me to write out my idea in more depth which made it much easier to explain in my paper briefly, but with more detail and in a way that it made more sense to the reader. When reading now, I noticed that because I am thinking more about how I can expand on ideas, I often made annotations on things I agreed or disagreed on so that way I could possibly learn from it or have a more detailed response on why I felt the way I did.
Paper 1: I made many connections to the Chabon article “My Son, The Prince of Fashion” because a lot of the quotes in there explain how he is self conscious about himself, but expresses his confidence through his clothes.
Paper 2: In paper 2 I made many connections to the “Pressure to Cover” article by Kenji Yoshino. He has a lot of good evidence as to why people are either forced to cover for their wellbeing or because they don’t want people to think of them in a different way. One of the points I made from reading Yoshino was that if everyone were to be different, then there would be no reason to cover because no one would be similar to you and I connected this to the story about F.D.R written by Erving Goffman.
Another connection I made was to “We’re 20 Percent Of America And We’re Still Invisible”. I used this article to connect to Yoshino’s “Pressure to Cover” because Heumann and Wodatch show covering in a different perspective. It explains how covering is not just done by people themselves, but people can cover other people too. Even if people think they might not be covering themselves, they could be covering someone else.
Paper 3: In this paragraph I made an inference about how Phelps-Roper from “Unfollow” by Adrian Chen was not unkind because she wanted to, but because she grew up learning the things she was doing. I connected it to how people are quick to judge her because all they see is her hateful words and actions, but she really didn’t know any better. (Don’t have an electronic source to show annotations)
