Blog #3: Project #3 Writing Process

For project #3, I employed more pre-writing techniques than I previously had used. I didn't have a hard time picking the social issue of America's need for universal heath care. The next step was to brainstorm a list of words and ideas that came to my mind thinking about the subject. After reviewing my brainstorm list, I free-wrote for 7 minutes without stopping. I found this exercise to be really helpful and a lot of the ideas I wrote down ended up in my actual draft. This free-writing exercise also gave me the basis for my focus statement. I found this paper easier to write than my other papers. I think this is partially because I care a lot about the subject but also a large part can be attributed to all the pre-writing I did.

Once I had all my thoughts in order and I decided on my focus statement, I had to find all my research sources. Then I composed my first draft, which was pretty sloppy because I didn't have much time to write it. In class, we did peer reviews and the comments that my reviewer left were helpful for me in organizing my paper format better. The comments also helped me to better develop my focus statement.

After I finished my second draft, I looked over the sheet that Ms. LoFaro gave us about common grammar problems. I did my best to throughly revise my paper using the grammar guidelines. I made sure that . I decided to elaborate on a couple of points that I hadn't fully explained in my prior drafts as well. My weakness for this paper was the annotated bibliography because I had a total of eight different sources. Some of the sources that I used were simple fact sheets that didn't have a ton of information so I had a hard time writing a through annotation of them.

Overall, I am very proud of my work on this final project. I think that my writing has evolved for the better, over the course of this class. I hope to use all of the knowledge that I gained from this course when I need to write papers in the future. I appreciate all of help and insight that Ms. LoFaro offered over the semester. I do not think I used to be a good writer, but I truly believe that I have grown as a writer and I feel much more confident about any future writing assignments I have.

Blog #2: Project 2 Writing Process

Project #2 was an argumentative essay about how a person creates their own sexual identity and set of sexual ethics in the world. This was a group assignment, which actually made the writing process harder. In class, we brainstormed about what specific aspects of sexual ethics we would focus on. We divided the work among our group and each person took a turn being project manager for the day. In order to stay connected out of class, we emailed and text messaged back and forth with ideas. Our group worked together on creating a thesis but we split up the different support paragraphs so that we each had a specific aspect of sexual identity to research. I researched how the medical advances involving sexual health influence a person's ethics. I was also in charge of forming the intro and conclusion paragraphs. Each of us wrote our own annotated bibliography entries for the sources that we used and combined them all together once we were done. Once we all had written our subjects, we got together and attempted to piece the subjects all together making sure they flowed with one another. My other group members reviewed what I wrote for the intro and conclusion and made changes that they felt were necessary. After we got our peer reviewed papers back, we took their suggestions into account and made changes. We did the same thing once we got our paper back from Ms. LoFaro. Once we made the necessary changes we each did a thorough read-over of our papers to make sure we had caught all the mistakes. Overall, I am proud of our paper and I think that we worked well together even though it got difficult sometimes to make sure everyone agreed on how something should be written.

Blog #1: Project 1 Writing Process

My writing process for this project was different than usual. I will admit that because I am not normally required to write multiple drafts, I don't. Usually, I just open up a blank document on my computer and write what comes to me, editing it while I go. This time, I started out by annotating the 2 articles I chose to analyze. Once I found all the different rhetorical devices that the authors used, I wrote up an outline to clarify what aspects of the articles my paper was going to cover. After my outline, I came up with my thesis/focus statement as well as my introduction, so that I could use that to base the rest of my paper on.

From there, I constructed the body of my paper for my first draft. I was careful to ensure that I didn't over-quote and when I did quote I properly introduced the quotes into the paper. I also made sure that I cited everything correctly. After peer editing of my first draft, I made some necessary grammar, flow and word choice changes to my 2nd draft. For my final draft, I am working on sharpening my thesis because right now it is not strong enough. I also need to add a couple more examples of rhetorical devices as well as expand with more details on the examples that I have already put in the paper. Hopefully I can make a good annotated bibliography and make the other changes needed to ensure that my paper is as good as it can be.