ENG 2150: Writing Through New York

For now I believe that my revision process is going much more smoothly than it did in my first paper. Upon reflecting on my first paper I realized that if  my thesis is not something I support then it will be much more difficult to write. That is why for this paper I made sure that the central idea of my paper was something that I fully supported and agreed with. Also, I prefer writing an assignment that isn’t open ended… don’t get me wrong, I love writing creatively, but i enjoy when there are specifications that I have to meet. This is because I basically have a checklist of what I need to incorporate into the essay. I think I have hit all of the points on the check list, I believe I just have to develop each point more to create a more sound argument.

I wouldn’t say that my paper is complete, but is continuously growing and becoming more developed. I’ve been rereading my paper trying to interpret it from different perspectives. This allows me to try to challenge my thesis with different questions and see if I have met the necessary burden of proof that any author has. In regard to my close reading I think I have closely enough analyzed specific quotations that support my thesis. (I’ve always done well with these kinds of assignments.) The only thing I’m apprehensive about is Professor Kaufman not being here. I keep having this reoccurring night mare that I’ve written a 150 page paper while she is away, and upon her return she tells me she hates the whole thing and wants me to revise, revise, revise! … I guess that’s just the anxiety of midterms aha, but besides that I’m very confident in my work.

My revision is going well but it is quite challenging. I have added many quotes and tried to look at things in a different way; imagining I am a reader seeing it for the first time. What would I add to make it read better? How would a magazine or other professional article read? I really am looking for ways to add information in the form of quotes and deep analysis to make my thoughts and ideas come to a professional college level fruition.

The challenge for me is to sit and find the right information to draw out. That’s the ‘close reading’ part and that analysis can be difficult for me. I tend to do better with black and white instructions. I mean, overall I prefer a total open-ended assignment; the creativity to do a free-write. But if there are guidelines; having to come up with my own analysis is challenging. I’m confident I will pull all this together and draw on my past mistakes in the 1st assignment to create a well written and organized paper that makes me proud of the effort I put in.

Close reading does not seem to me so hard from the beginning, but after I started working on my second paper it appeared to be very difficult. The most challenging part for me is to analyze. By its definition, analyzing is stating your own opinion and expanding on it based on the evidences presented. Another term close in meaning to analyzing is summarizing, that is where it gets confusing for me. I caught myself thinking and wondering while proofreading my second paper whether I analyzed or summarized instead. At this moment I am struggling to distinguish whether I am summarizing or analyzing. There is obviously a difference between these two terms, but still for me this remains a bit challenging and difficult.

For the second paper I chose “Goodbye to all that”, written by Joan Didion. I think it is a very interesting narrative and there is much to write about. I noticed for instance that after I read the story for the first time I had a notion about what was going on in the narration. Interestingly enough after I read the story a second, third and fourth time my first impression changed and I have now a much clearer idea about the story and the author’s life circumstances.

In order to perform good on this assignment I have to be able to read between the lines and try to analyze the situation in order to attain a clear sense about what the author wrote. Each time I re-read the story every little word made more and more sense to me. This played a key role in understanding the whole picture of the narrative.

Overall it is an interesting project. I am surprised that through this work I was able in a way to compare myself to the author. At the same time I am learning through her experience which is a lot to learn. It has been known that it is better to learn from somebody else’s mistakes rather than from your own.

Revising my draft for this paper has been difficult because my first draft had a vague thesis. I’m trying to improve on that by making a more specific and stronger thesis. My first draft has some summary, so I edited that out and instead of summaries, are now analyses. Originally, I only had two, three quotes and now I’ve including some more and incorporated them into my essay.

I’m still revising, but I’m going to reread the story again and maybe another time and ask myself why did I choose this story out of all the rest? When I find the answer to that, I think it’ll help me with my thesis a lot. The peer editing with the coloring helped me see what was wrong with my paper. I had some irrelevant paragraphs that I hadn’t noticed before. Sometimes my writing would just drift off and go off topic. I still need to fix that and possibly incorporate it into my essay. As of now, I’d say I’m barely half done with editing my essay.

So far, I am still struggling with the second revision.  Strengthening my thesis statement is one of the things that I am still struggling with.  Explaining and analyzing the evidence is another thing that I am struggling with.  However, I am satisfied with the amount of quotes I have so far.  If I find more ways to prove my thesis statement, I will add more quotes.

My classmates underlined many of the summarization in my first draft.   I am going to fix the things that I am missing as well like the analysis.  Turning the summarization into analysis is still a problem for me.  I am planning to e-mail Professor Kaufman my thesis statement to make sure if my thesis statement is strong enough.