Our focus this week is on your Personal Narratives. By the time you read this, you should have received some feedback from the members of your writing group via the peer review process and should be turning your attention to the REVISION process. Please keep in mind that REVISION is not the same thing as EDITING or PROOFREADING.
REVISION is the process of rethinking and reshaping both the structure and the content of your essay. As you gain greater clarity about what it is that you really want to say, you will often find that you need to eliminate large chunks of your original draft, create new material to respond to important questions that have arisen, and reorganize the essay in order to make it more effective. Very often, when we begin drafting an essay, we are focussed on meeting the length requirement and on simply unlocking our creative energy by getting our writing going; this usually means focussing less on content, style, and structure and more on simply getting our thoughts down on the page. When we revise, we take a step back from our draft, review the goals and purpose of this writing project, and use this as an opportunity to refocus and refine our plan. In short, revision (which literally means “seeing anew” focuses on the big picture of our essay’s ideas and execution.
EDITING is the process of making our writing as effective as possible. It is during the editing process that we turn our attention to word choice, sentence structure, tone, and other elements that might fall under the loose category of “style.” Here too we might find ourselves moving things around in our essay in order to make our paragraphs more effective. A great strategy to employ during this stage of the process is reading aloud. When we read our work aloud, we can hear awkwardness, errors, and stylistic issues that our eyes simply don’t catch. Through the editing process, your writing should get brighter, sharper, and clearer.
PROOFREADING is the last step that you take before submitting work to your professor, before pressing send on an email, or printing an important document. During the proofreading process, we look for typos, spelling errors, spacing problems and anything else that might detract from the polished quality of our finished work or distract our reader. It is often really useful to swap papers with an eagle-eyed friend for the proofreading process. Sometimes we have a hard time spotting our own errors. Do NOT rely on spell-check to find all your errors for you.
On Monday, February 22nd, you will be meeting with me in your Writing Groups according to the schedule listed below. Additionally, you should be connecting with your Writing Groups without me in order to go over the feedback from the Peer Review, get additional advice, and formulate your next steps. Your group should decide how it would like to meet. (Some options are Slack, group chat, facetime, or Zoom. I am happy to schedule and host zoom meetings for you.)
11:30 – 12:00 Group 1: Geselle, Kaylen, Abdu
12:00 – 12:30 Group 2: Samantha, Gianni, Nicole
12:30 – 1:00 Group 3: Melanie, Mokhitobon, Sydney
1:00 – 1:30 Group 4: Lorraine, Danna, Brian
1:30 – 2:00 Group 5: Destiny, Lelani, Mindy
To prepare for your conference, please do the following:
- Read your peer review feedback carefully and connect with your partners if you need further clarification.
- Begin your revision process (as described above) and be prepared to discuss it on Monday.
- Add an update to the #essays channel in our Slack workspace in which you share one piece of particularly helpful feedback that you received about your draft and describe how you will be addressing it through your revision. You can also use this update as an opportunity to share whatever aspects of the process you are having difficulty with. Keep an eye on this channel, and respond to your classmates’ updates where you think you can be helpful or encouraging. (If you still haven’t joined our class’s Slack workspace, go to the “Technology” tab at the top of the blog. You can find a link for Slack in the information posted there.)
For Wednesday, February 24th: Please read Sam Anderson’s essay “I Recommend Eating Chips” which you can find on the blog under the “Texts” tab. Before class, please post to the blog:
–One word you had to look up from Anderson’s essay, together with its definition.
–A line that made you LOL or at least smile.
–If you were assigned an essay like this – a love letter to a particular food or eating experience, what would it be? Why?
For Thursday, February 25th:. Your essays are due by midnight. As I explained in the essay assignment, you will create a folder with your name plus English 2150 in its title and share the folder with me. Add your finished version of the essay to the folder.
A word that I had to look up from Anderson’s essay was “imminent” which means (about to happen). This word struck me because of the way he used it in his sentence structure as he goes about speaking on the Doritos he is about to eat and he is also excited about it as well. A line that made me smirk a bit was when he says, ” Eating these chips will rescue us, above all, from the very worst things on our screens, the cursed news of the outside world — escalating numbers, civic decay, gangs of elderly men behaving like children.” This made me smirk because of the sense of figurative language he portrays and how he kind of uses the chips as a symbol of relief from all the stress built up and compares older men acting like “children” symbolizing how the chips could get people out of character. If I were to write a story about a certain food I feel like it would have to be barbeque chicken pizza because this is my favorite food of all time and I never seem to get tired of it. I would describe it in the full 5 senses and would bring it to life.
– I looked up for the word “receptacles” and it means this sort of an object or space that’s used to contain something.
– A line that made me smile is the following, “Join me. Grab whatever you’ve got. Open the bag. Pinch it on its crinkly edges and pull apart the seams.” In this line I like the words that the author uses, the tone of it seems pleasant and affirmative. When the author says “grab whatever you’ve got” its speech sounds cool and basically telling the reader “let’s go, let’s do it”. Therefore, I believe that line was most of all positive and a happy mood tone.
– If I had to write an essay like this, it would absolutely be fun and great. First of all, I have like so many junk-food’s that I can write about since I love eating it. It helps me feel relaxed sometimes when I may feel anxious or stressed. Though, I would chose to write about the crunchy chips so called, “Lay’s”. The lay’s chip are definitely good and I love its salty taste, they are my favorite.
I looked up the word “imminent” which means that it will happen at some point. This word struck me because of the structure the author uses to describe the Doritos and how happy he feels about the Doritos. A line that made me simile was, “That is the great virtue of chips; they are here for us to eat them. So that is what we will do.” This line attracts me because of the words that the author utilizes such as “Virtue of chips” and “for us to eat them.” This line is important because it sets a positive about chips and why people should eat chips because the chips exist for people to eat them. If I wrote an essay similar to this one, I would write a fun story about milkshakes and why more people need to drink it based on my personal experience drinking milkshakes. I would write about milkshakes because milkshakes taste very nice and often are not as recognized as ice coffee or other drinks.
One word I had to look up was prosaic which means having the style or diction of prose; lacking poetic beauty.
A line that made me smile was the first line of the second paragraph when he specified that he is eating cool ranch doritos which are my favorite.
If I were assigned an essay like this i’d probably write it about oreos.