SLO Reflection (Part 3)

This final blog post is mean to reflect on me as a writer and how I perceived myself at the beginning to the course compared to now. In my intial blog post, I compared myself to a year round high school athlete who excels in the various sports they participate in. In terms of writing, that would mean that I do well in the different types of writing. At this point in time I realize that I may not have excelled as well as I initially thought. Mainly with argumentive writing, I struggled on my first research essay by summarizing more than arguing. Thus I spent alot of energy making sure I could argue a point better through words and this is the aspect I believe I improved the most on through this class. An element of writing that was somewhat new to me was rhetorical awareness or being able to jump into an already occuring argument. Being new to me, this is the point I believe I should monitor in future writing since I've never really thought much of it before the class. The class will benefit me in the future by making rhetorical awareness an element worth looking at.

SLO Reflection (Part 2)

This blog post serves the purpose of reflecting on my critical thinking and writing skills. I honestly believe that through the class my critical thinking skills have become better. Particularly, the use of the "precis" as an assignment allowed me to better identify what the main points of text were as well as supporting points and the reasons behind the text being written in the first place.I also believe that the ability to synthesize multiple writings into one argument was also developed through this class mainly due to the research papers we had to write. I definitely improved my writing in the class. On the first research paper, I did more summarizing than argument and I truly hoped to fix that. I came back with the 2nd essay and based on feedback I had made a big turnaround by having highly defined argumentation as well as analysis.

SLO Reflection (Part 1)

This blog post serves the purpose of reflecting on the objectives for the class and seeing if I've improved in those aspects. Particularly for this post I'll be focusing on Close Reading and Research. In terms of close reading I believe I have improved through various activities provided in the class. Particularly, the task of having to create a precis for the main readings definitely helped. I believe that is the main thing that helped with my reading. For the precis we essentially have to effectively summarize a piece of writing be it an article or an entire book and the precis is definitely a tool I'll take to heart in future reading. Research wise, I dont believe I improved too much. This isnt due to the class though. I did learn how to use the UWT database to find viable sources and that will defeinitly benefit me in the future. Aside from that, i dont believe my research process was affected much. Nonetheless I indeed benefited from this class and hope to retain everything I've learned in the future.

"Performance, Feedback, Revision"

To me revision is just going back through a paper I've written and improving it in as many aspects as possible. For starters, grammar is usually the initial revision and with this I tend to check if the paper flows well based on the words I use to get my point across. Aside from flow I also look at the points I have highlighted and decide whether I want to keep those points in the first place. After getting feedback, some points may not be viable anymore and thus I feel I should change up my writing. Along with the revision comes the sense of precision as well because by that time you know exactly what you want to say and are able to 'clean' up your writing so it fits  your criteria.

State of Essay 2

Having written a rough draft for essay 2 and turned it in, I would say that the essay is alright at this point in time. I dont believe its too over the top though. I dont see it as overdone or underdone. I believe I put the right amount of time into it, but there always room for improvement. Particularly, I'd want to see if my argumentation is done well. For essay 1 I was critiqued for doing more summarization as opposed to argumentation and that is definitely something I would like to fix. Personally, I'd also like to include West's article a bit more into the essay. Considering the prompt is to use West's framework to analyze a blog, I want to incorporate her findings and methods more in order to strengthen the essay. The methods may even help me to further discern identity and thats always a good thing.

Plans for Essay 2

At this point I just wanna further develop my essay. So far I only have one key point so far in terms of finding the identity of the blogger. Also this is a very good point, I still want to add more to it so my argument is made stronger. I suppose in short I want just get my argument together and get a complete paper done. Afterwards I can revise and such. I'd also like to take the 3step quotation process to heart and incorporate it well into my essay. The activity in class actually spawned a decent paragraph from the quote I used which I intend to put within the essay at some point. In terms of problems I cant think of anything in particular other than just staying motivated and staying focused when I'm actually writing. I tend to get sidetracked and I dont want this to interfere with my writing since I may go off topic. Other than just myself I dont see any other problems.

Annotated Bibliography (Practice)

Huffaker, D. A., and Calvert, S. L. (2005).Gender, identity, and language use in teenage blogs. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10, 1. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue2/huffaker.html

This article essentially starts off by saying how identity begins in infancy and ends with the culmination of ones life. The article then focuses specifically on Adolescent identity and says how it is significant in that it allows for youth to establish their self identity in ways that weren't otherwise possible during childhood. Specifically, the ability to reflect on one's own thoughts is mentioned and is said to lead to a "new dimension of self discovery. From then on the writers analyze the language and emotional codes that adolescents use to express themselves in blogs and elaborate on their particular findings such as the use of emoticons and diction.
I believe that this article can hold relevance in my future research seeing as the upcoming essay requires the analysis of a blog and personally I was hoping to observe a teenage blog for the sense of being able to relate. This article fits perfectly with what I hope to do in that it essentially focuses on the key things worth looking at in terms of teenage blogs. It would be extremely useful for my research.