When the semester first began, I was always super confident in my writing. All throughout high school, I always received grades in the mid 90s and got amazing feedback from my teachers and peers. This semester though, I realized how much I was able to improve. There were so many things that I learned that I could use in my writing that will enhance it to its best potential. The most important thing that I learned was how to receive feedback and revise my essays and delve further into detail in specific parts of my writing.
From one assignment to the next, I definitely carried over the use of an intellectual problem. I found that narrowing down my paper to one specific problem is so much better than focusing on a problem as a whole. The use of stating a question in your essay makes it so much easier to make it as clear as possible to the reader what I will be trying to prove. Sometimes though, I found it kind of hard to narrow down everything I wanted to prove with one simple question. Reading back my last 3 essays, I really do realize how this narrow question helps develop the essay in a way I never thought possible. Also, on almost all my drafts you kept on asking me to re-state the question over and over again in the middle parts of my paper. I never realized how important this was until recently. While reading someone’s paper, you get a bit side tracked and almost forget the main point of the paper, but stating the intellectual problem over and over again makes sure your point does now get lost in the paper. I also learned how to properly and better use citations. I always used to just simply, copy and paste the quote and then in parenthesis, write out the author of the article I am copying from. In this class, I constantly made sure to start introducing the author of the article I am citing and discuss what he is saying before the quote and a bit after. When I was not doing this, I feel like the reader never got a clear sense of why I am quoting this author and why this specific quote will help further prove my point. I feel like both these new found ways of writing will help me throughout all my classes because both of these tactics are very general, but still allow you to make your writing so much better.
I learned to critically analyze texts that we have read in class and use them appropriately in my papers. For essay 1, when we had to close read “Evidence” and form an intellectual problem from that, I found it really hard to do so at first. I could not seem to get myself to really read in between the lines and find “the hidden message” the writer was trying to portray using tone of voice, specific uses of words and specific descriptions of settings around him.
Using a variety of media to compose multiple rhetorical situations helped me to build my essay and focus on a broader audience. I found that by using different forms of media and different perspectives from each source helped me target many audiences while still redirecting back to my main point. These different perspectives also helped me to look at my argument from different points of view. Instead of only focusing on what I think about my topic, I got to see what other writings, government officials or any other type of professional thinks about what I am trying to argue.
Throughout the semester, I absolutely loved the peer review and the constant back and forth with the drafts. I never realized how important feedback could be to the development of your paper. I was getting feedback on how to improve things I didn’t even think I needed to do. Also, the feedback was so helpful because when I am writing and then reading my own work, I think, “oh wow this is absolutely perfect! Definitely an A paper!” but when a fresh set of eyes looks it over, the problems with your writing end up coming up. I also really liked the meetings that you set up with us to talk one-on-one about our drafts. These little meetings gave me an opportunity to speak to you if something I was doing was not clear and how I would be able to improve it. Also, I found myself at the writing center a few times and really realized how important that is. Sometimes, when I would go, they would help me realize a better point to prove rather than what I am trying to prove. They were able to fix specific things about my paper that I did not even think needed fixing.
On my last paper, I realized how important it is to really narrow down an audience to a specific group. Since on my second paper, I wrote about college rape and how it is mishandled, for my third paper I decided to write about rape in a mans world. At first, I focused on all men in general, but the more I started researching, I realized that my audience was too broad. So I then decided to narrow it down to guys that are still young and in college. When I began to conduct my interviews, I realized that the guys that I was interviewing were all young straight men, so I decided that that will be my audience. Narrowing my audience down also made it so much easier for me to conduct research because I was primarily focusing on one type of guy rather than all men.
When I read the first email that I sent you, my main goal was to improve my writing; clearly I was not specific enough. Like I stated at the beginning of the semester, I am planning on studying marketing and advertising and a lot of that is speaking and being clear and to the point and how to target a specific audience. A lot of my work in the future will be giving speeches and conducting interviews, and taking this class definitely taught me how to correctly organize whatever it is that I desire to write about.