Look over these Course Goals and Unit Subgoals that relate to “intermediate” considerations at the level of paragraphing, analysis, etc.
- Identify and engage with credible sources and multiple perspectives in your writing: Identify sources of information and evidence credible to your audience; incorporate multiple perspectives in your writing by summarizing, interpreting, critiquing, and synthesizing arguments of others; and avoid plagiarism by ethically acknowledging the work of others when used in your own writing, using a citation style appropriate to your audience and purpose.
- Using examples effectively in your writing to help illustrate things you are trying to explain or argue
- Learn the differences between genres at the level of words, sentences, paragraphing, document design, mode, etc.
- Learn how to analyze vs. summarize
- Find, evaluate, and synthesize evidence in texts we analyze
- Establish links between claims and evidence
- Develop information literacy (e.g., finding information via search engines/library databases/stacks, evaluating source credibility and relevance, analyzing primary vs. secondary sources, using citation tools)
- Write with other voices (e.g., paraphrasing, direct quotes, summary, footnotes, endnotes, managing claims and evidence with other voices, qualifying claims, counterarguments)
The sort of things you can think about here: What have you noticed in earlier introductions, conclusions, or body paragraphs in terms of using examples, writing with sources, establishing links between claims and evidence, establishing the exigence or reason for writing, etc. that has changed from earlier drafts to newer drafts?
The above is just an example to think through, but utilize the full list of course and unit goals above to think through possible questions and things you can notice in how your writing grew from early on to where it is now (and feel free to use writing from other classes to help you think about this if you want!
In a comment below, using notes from last week when you close read your own writing as well as through returning to skimming through your writing again, talk through specific evidence from your writing that you might use to write about your writing in terms of “intermediate” aspects of writing. Use about 100-200 words to do this.
Remember: nothing has to be “perfect” here…you can write about things that improved but you still would like to keep improving! That is honestly how most of this stuff is: frustratingly always-in-progress. But, life is kind of always in process and sort of never finished, so, yeah.
After commenting below, click on the button to continue the module:
One thing at the intermediate level that I am writing on is about using credible sources in my writing. One major thing that I focused on during my Research-Driven project was making sure to only use peer-reviewed sources and reading up on the sources that I chose. I would make sure to see if the author of the source was from a reputable publication and organization. All of my sources were obtained from the Baruch library and each source was checked on numerous occasions. I was able to use prior experience with search engines and databases and this all assisted me in my process to find my sources.
One thing at the intermediate level that I can talk about is finding, evaluating, and synthesizing evidence. The research paper has really demonstrated that I can look for credible and relevant evidence to support my argument. I think it starts with a well thought out thesis. If a thesis is too narrow, then there may not be much sources out there to gather up and make a point. If a thesis is too broad, one problem that could come up is that the argument is not worth arguing about. Once the general pathway of a thesis is solidified, then the process of evidence-gathering begins, and the job of the researcher is to find useful details and organize them within the planning structure of the research paper.
At the intermediate level, I believe that I have managed to differentiate between analyzing versus summarizing because the former, in my opinion, relates to conducting a detailed examination of a given piece of text to understand it much better, while the latter involves providing a shorter description of a larger piece of work. However, I believe that I still need to improve on my synthesizing skills because it is only then that I will be able to connect claims and evidence and to incorporate a wider variety of sources into my writing.
In my reflective piece, I will be talking about writing using other voices. This is very important to me cause I always like to keep air on the side of caution whenever I’m quoting or using information from other text. It is crucial to distinguish what the author is saying from what I add to that information. I also like to build up my argument by complementing my sources and for these, I have to respect the information given by each author and document.
One thing at the intermediate level that I can share my thoughts on is sourcing, and how to source properly. I focused on/ relied on my sources heavily in almost every single paper I wrote this semester. The sources gave my papers the evidence they were missing, and I used them to my advantage in order to get my points across. My sources were all “professional” level sources and all helped build my arguments in each paper.
One thing that I think I am improving on is using evidence and analyzing it. In high school, I knew that I had to use a certain amount of evidence and analyze it enough to get a good score. This often made me feel like I didn’t know what evidence I could use because I was too focused on just getting enough evidence for the good grade. Now, I finds that I am better able to find evidence that I feel actually matters and I can tie it into my writing better as a whole. I also believe that since I am able to get better evidence that actually helps my arguments, it is much easier to analyze what I am citing.
One thing I worked on in the intermediate level was identifying and engaging with credible sources. In my research paper I spent hours looking for sources and ended up finding 8 peer review sources. In the past I usually struggle to understand and find these sources but I turned that around for this essay. After really trying I was able to understand the sources really well and integrate them into my writing. Although I can still improve I am proud to see how much I improved since the beginning the the semester.
At the intermediate level, I can say I have managed to write in different voices. I have learned to better manage paraphrasing from other sources, using direct quotes and summarizing. Before, when I would link a source into my writing, I would usually just incorporate the quote and analyzing it or explain it. Now, I have learned to read the source and express it into my own words.
Something on an intermediate level that I see has changed in my writing is my formatting. Before I think I tried to force the same format on all of my writing and I have grown from that. I reread my literacy narrative and I feel like the introduction is unnecessarily long and I really think that is due to the fact that I believed it had to be a certain length. In both my rhetorical analysis and research-driven writing my formatting in general is very different and that is because I formatted it in a way that made sense not in the way I thought it needed to be.
My Rhetorical Analysis wasn’t perfect, but I felt satisfied at the end because I stayed true to the source and kept drawing examples of context behind the writer and the band’s other work. I often read lyrical analyses by fans and sometimes if they don’t give plausible examples or sources then the analysis could be really stretched and not reflect what the writer intended to convey. It was also important to keep the main idea of the song in mind and not project my own beliefs and feelings onto the lyrics.
One thing I also want to talk about is how following my writing schedule affected the quality of writing in addition to the style of writing. For instance, on one of my better papers, I followed through with my writing schedule. Whereas, when I didn’t follow that schedule my writing quality suffered.