Pay Attention! Or, what is our brain on the Internet?

My first paper was pretty bad, I have always had trouble gathering my ideas and trying to raise an argument. Since I know it is something I have always had trouble I try to work on it and try to get better but seems to me like nothing can really fi this problem at least that is what I though. Last week I meet with professor Kaufman and it was great. I recommend to the people that have not gone to see her. She just asked me one question and I began to write. And by stating that comment “So what”, I got my thesis.

Something that I will work on this paper is read out loud. I never imagine that strategy actually working but it really does. As I was in professors Kaufman office I read out loud, and made of face of all the silly mistakes I had made. As I work on my second paper I will ask my self “so what” through out my paper and read out loud to correct my grammar.

It really sucks how I have tests and papers due all on the same week. That really makes it hard for me to fully concentrate on one thing such as this paper. I really need to manage my time better. I’m wondering if other people have this same problem.

Anyway, after reading the professor’s comments, I have realized that I have too many ideas for this short 3-5 page paper. As we wrote a group essay in class, I’m sure most of us found out that their thesis may have been too broad. This paper is about recreating a classroom and that requires details on the looks of the classroom. I haven’t really wrote much details on how my reinvented classroom would look like. There are many parts of my writing where I put down my idea, but I was not specific in detail and examples. Quotes are also a problem for me because I know I need to have some evidence from the book to include in my writing too.

First, I need to narrow down my ideas into maybe just one or two of my strongest ideas. This way, throughout the paper, I can be more detailed about each idea and give supporting examples. I must be able to paint a picture of a specific classroom and show/analyze how and why it works to be able to convince my readers. Then, I need to find quotes to support my argument. I believe this is pretty much it for this first revision.

After reading over my essay I found that my topic was too broad. I need to take one specific aspect of my 21st century classroom and stick to it. My thesis needs some work as well. It should give a strong idea of what my essay is going to be about. If I have a poor thesis statement, I leave my readers with a bad first impression of the essay.

I also need to step away from the traditional essay writing process that I’ve learned in high school. I find that this process hinders my ability to write what I truly want to write. The old fashioned “5 paragraph essay” is not the best writing method and will not work for this course. With all these revision ideas, i hope to write a well structured and analyzed essay.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been revising my draft and I started to notice that I didn’t really have a valid thesis. After looking through my points and my introduction paragraph for awhile, I started to see that I wasn’t arguing anything. But I had my ideas out there on how the classroom should change to live up to the modern classroom environment.

I was happy to find out that I needed to work on my thesis and reorganize my body paragraphs, but I had a big problem on writing my thesis because I didn’t know how to combine all the three topics that would be flowy and still be interesting to the reader. I have to admit, I sound dull in my paper, but I’m excited to change all that by making the reader more engaged with personal examples and something that I can relate to in the body paragraphs. I’m still trying to make a “hook” that is effective as our group essay and don’t make the rest of my essay sound like a robot. Even though I’ve been revising my essay, I ended up with small progress, but if I can establish my thesis, I think my paper would be definately be stronger than what I’ve had on my rough draft.

I feel what I have been struggling with most is the classroom. The classroom originally to me was all physical appearance. I am now taking a step back and thinking the effects these physical things would have on the classroom and expand more on that. I feel I need to strengthen my thesis to be more precise and let the reader know what the paper is going to be about while getting the reader intrigued.

The coloring activity helped me a lot with helping me eliminate my summary. The comments on my paper as well have helped me pinpoint obvious grammar mistakes as well as parts of my essay that can use more analysis. Our class discussion on analysis also makes me confident that I will be able to put quality analysis in my paper.