Overall, this project was quite unique to any other writing assignment I’ve had to complete. I found it interesting that I had to integrate the work of my peers into my own argument. To begin this project, I first selected the foundational text I wanted to work with. I knew I had some interest diving deeper into this idea of technological distraction and how this is effecting human behavior. With this theme in mind that I wanted to grapple with, I gravitated towards Sam Anderson’s piece. This text was also especially intriguing to me because I had yet to use it in the preceding projects. After selecting Anderson and reviewing my annotations, I dove into the student narratives and found excerpts written by my peers that aligned with my own thoughts, or aligned or complicated what Anderson was arguing. In the end, I landed on using Katie McGuire and Faith Santiago’s writing. Then, before jumping right into the writing process I made an outline and pulled all the quotes from the three perspectives that I wanted to work with. This really helped me find areas where they were “speaking” to one another. This process of creating an outline was a new tool I employed for this project specifically and I am so happy I did. Project #3 really developed my ability to synthesize my ideas with others and incorporate many voices in a relatively concise amount of words. I would like to highlight my ability to make a very focused claim that guides my paper and my ability to give thoughtful comments on the work of my peers. Some areas of improvement that were illuminated by Project #3 was a lack of balance of the “they say, I say” throughout my writing. There were areas in my essay lacked my personal views on the argument. Adding more of my own personal analysis will allow my writing to gain a new level of strength and will make my argument more persuasive.
Reflecting on my time in this class, I can say that I have seen significant progress in my writing abilities. Specifically, I feel as though my analysis of quotes has gotten far more extensive. In other writing classes, and even in the early projects in this class, I feel as though many of my quotes were just placed into my paper and forgotten about. I did not spend much time analyzing the quotes and inserting myself into the conversation and provided where I stand on the subject. I feel as though in later projects, specifically 2 and 3, I took a larger place in the conversation. Instead of wasting critical word space blabbering, just trying to fill the page, I included thoughtful words to further the overall paper. An obstacle that I had to overcome was receiving constructive criticism. With peer review being such an important aspect of this course, I had to learn that the feedback from my peers was meant to be helpful, not critical. In the past I was never one to put too much emphasis into what others said about my writing. Probably egotistical of me, but I would always feel as though what I put on the page is what needed to be on the page. This course has shown me the importance of peer review and just how influential it can be in my growth as a writer. With this being said, I was happy with the emphasis that I placed on my revision. I took what my peers had to say in mind and went through each of their annotations and adjusted my paper accordingly. In my future writing assignments in this course and in other courses, I will look to eliminate any form of procrastination. I believe this was something I mentioned in the last reflection, but it is still an issue that I need to work on. Far too often I would find myself putting off the assignments because I would find something better to do, and at my worst moments, putting off working on my assignment to the next half hour, ¾ hour, or hour as I continued my TikTok or any other social media app I could push my attention to. I believe that to combat this issue, I am going to set goals for myself. For example, I will say “In the next 45 minutes, I want to reach 500 words”. I feel as though doing this will insure that I am able to complete my assignments with as little distraction as posssible.
I feel my writing process for this essay was a lot messier than my past projects. Prior to this project, I was aiming to put my words into the perfect formatting right away. For example, I would not start my body paragraphs until I had a complete intro and a solid thesis, even though the last two times I did this, I ended up going back and changing my thesis quite a bit. For this project, I developed a more “choppy” way of writing, but I think it was beneficial in helping me not get writer’s block, and I was able to develop a lot of solid ideas that I would’ve been delayed in developing if I took my more rigid approach. During this essay, I feel like I had a stronger grasp on how to place two writers in conversation with each other. I came into this project a little nervous about how to place two authors who agree with each other into conversation, but I feel that having the experience from project 2 gave me a good foundation on how to do this. During revision, I was very focused on making sure that I had a good balance of they say/I say, especially taking into account how I also had to place the authors in conversation with each other. I put my phone across the room from me and took at least 30 minutes dissecting each of my paragraphs, and wrote down where exactly I was placing my sources in conversation, and where I was adding my own input. Doing this really helped me make sure that the ideas that I wanted to convey were actually coming through, and when they weren’t I knew to go back and revise. I think my biggest struggle, which I am sensing is a pattern in all of my writing, is using overly complex sentences, and creating a lot of run-ons. As I begin writing, I more or less dump all of my thoughts onto the page, without regard for how well written they are. It’s helpful for when I need to hit the word counts for the drafts, but is a huge pain to revise when I realize that I have to rewrite most of my sentences. In the future, I plan to help fix his habit by making sure I slow down my brain in order to ensure that I’m writing more thoughtful words, and also to trust myself and have confidence that I am being clear with my writing so I don’t feel the need to over explain myself.
The writing process for this last project was somewhat different than what I have done before. Obviously, this project shared similar ideas to our last project, but I felt like what I had to say played more of a role. When I began this project, I spent my time compiling ideas from the essay’s that my classmates had wrote and comparing them to one of the author’s that I had previously read about. I then proceeded to make a rough draft with the three authors of my choice, but this essay felt different. Since I had plenty of time to think of ideas to write about, I felt as though my essay was less forced and more personal. Even though I did not like having to turn in rough drafts with different word counts, I found that it helped me by preventing procrastination. This class has taught me how to use a new writing format to my advantage and how it can make my argument stronger. This class was also able to teach me about metacommentary and even though I have previously been taught to use my own perspective, I felt like my writing was stronger once I knew what I was doing. Using my own personal evidence to my advantage truly helped strengthen my paper. Meeting the deadline for this project was very easy because I spaced out each rough draft perfectly so that I never felt rushed. Even though I do not like writing in class, I found myself enjoying writing about this topic and furthering my argument. Something that felt super successful for me was having a thesis that flowed throughout the paper, as well as having interesting topic sentences. I tend to struggle with transitions and topic sentences, so it was interesting when I felt like that was my strength during this project. I was very proud of myself during this project for not procrastinating. Due to my topic at hand, I really enjoyed making my argument stronger and finding solid evidence that gave purpose to my project. One thing that I felt like I struggled with was staying on topic. Since this was something that I enjoyed writing about, I found myself writing more than I needed to and it did not help my argument. Another thing that I struggled with was making my sentences too wordy. I think that when I write, I get so lost in my own thoughts that I do not actually realize that what I am saying sounds redundant. Overall, my efforts for this project was much better and I really enjoyed diving deeper into this topic than my last project.
I found this project to be quite difficult in comparison to the last two projects. I felt that with the addition of three different sources, plus your own commentary on top of that, it was very difficult to get my entire point across without rambling too hard. With the writing process, I do not think I did a very good job this time. I finished most of the essay very early in the writing process and because of that, I did not have any motivation to return to the paper to add to it very much. I felt that if I had worked on this essay a little bit more on my own, then I would have had a little more thoughtful words in my essay. The topic overall was fine, I felt that in some cases in the beginning of drafting it was difficult to find voices that spoke to each other and to the article that I chose for the essay. The overall process was not very intriguing this time and that Is mostly due to the fact that I finished most of the essay early on and did not want to do more of it at all. I feel though that my efforts to this project are very strong, just not very polished.
I have finished many papers for both humanity and scientific writing, and the ones we have done for this class have been interesting to say the least. I do not consider myself the strongest writer or creator of ideas, but I was able to open up to a new style of creating a narrative piece from unknown authors. For this recent project, I think I may have taken it in a different direction than some of the other authors in the class, which may not have been an overall bad thing, but just different. My approach to writing seems to be a little different in general, as I can sometimes find it difficult to locate something that is close to the topic but also not being rude or disruptive to the associated topic. That was a challenge this semester when using the compare methods of the previous 2 essays. I wanted to make sure to have a decent enough argument while making sure to have the basic formatting complete. Everyone has their own way of writing which was very interesting to see how they grew and evolved over the semester. The peer editing sessions allowed us to see what folks tried to change or how they may have had a new approach to a problem, and it was good to see how they did that. After this semester, I don’t see myself writing too many essays in the style like we have been doing for this semester. My line of work just doesn’t have this kind of standard. But I will definitely keep in mind the different styles and techniques we have gone over, especially the stuff surrounding how we are able to weigh each portion of the paper and being able to have equal enough proportions to make a solid argument from every direction. I have always struggled with this in the past. A decent portion of essays I have completed in the past, looking back now, I believe that they were a bit disproportional with how much of one side is added and not so much the other. I often find a tangent or niche bit of information that I relate to more than another and will carry that through a good portion of the essay, and really just washing out narrative and arguments from the other side. Looking back on the semester, if I had to change anything about my writing style I would probably focus more on the evaluation of others’ ideas. By not having more I did this and I think that, it may help defend the arguments in a circular manner and have a more balanced essay.
The process of writing this project compared to the other two was much different. Obviously, for the first project, it was easy enough; there was only one text to work off of. For project 2, we had to choose two of the essays we had discussed. However, for project 3, we had to pick two essays written by peers and one essay that we went over in class, and put them all in conversation. This proved to be very challenging as no two peer-written essays held the same viewpoint, not only that, but finding two peer-written essays that had enough in common with each other and also had enough in common with whatever essay we chose from in class. Usually, getting these projects turned in on time is no problem for me; however, this one was problematic for me. I was having a hard time finding texts that worked well together, and I wasn’t ever truly happy with any of the ones I put together. Honestly, my biggest success with this project will be if I manage to pull it together and get it turned in as a finished product on time. Like I said before, this project has been a bit of a struggle for m,e and I am completely the one to blame, I’m writing this reflection the day the project is due and the project still isn’t finished. If I could change one thing about how I went about this project, I would listen to myself from the previous project self-reflections and stop procrastinating. And at this point in school, I realize that my chronic procrastination probably won’t go away because it’s just how I process and do work. For example, I have put off just about every assignment I have gotten this year until the last minute, pulling my hair out, especially this project.
This project was a very different set up than my last ones. I enjoyed reading my peers’ essays and finding quotes from their writing. I chose Turkle because I felt strongly about connecting her piece to two of my peers. She covers a lot of areas but out of all of the articles the one that interests me the most with empathy and feelings. I collected quotes from her research and then my two peers that would work well together. Throughout my writing I changed some of my quotes. I made lists for both of the student writing and compared points to turkle that I thought were similar and I knew I would be able to include my I say. However after my peer review I realized that I didn’t include any personal experience so when editing I had a lot to add in. However I felt that it was easy because I was able to relate to my peers, especially Tyler’s writing. In this essay I felt like I really focused on peer review and benefited out of it. In my last essay I somewhat brushed off what my peers would say and fixed some things. I also found that I procrastinated much less than my Project 2 and I think it has to do with finding a lot of interest in trying to connect three people in conversation. I also felt like I put a lot of effort into the little steps of this project which made me feel more successful. This made meeting the deadlines and word counts for each step much easier as I had struggled with that in the past. The only thing I felt like was a big struggle was not making my writing cluttered since I had so much I wanted to talk about and use from each writing piece. I enjoyed that I was able to build off of my last projects well because the topics were all related. I was able to advance my writing skills with all of the new techniques I had learned throughout the class so far. Compared to my last projects I felt like I trusted myself so much more in this one and was able to get through it with less overthinking than my last ones. I had more thoughts to add to the page instead of just trying to meet the word count. Overall this project felt very interesting and I was super happy that I did not procrastinate much.
My specific process in writing with the theme, Writing and Technology, I felt that it was easiest to dig deep in myself and then outwardly relate those feelings to the text I was learning about. During our first assignment we were asked to write freely about what comes to mind with the topic of writing and technology, and I immediately went into personal experience. I talked about how I was raised and how it affected me, as well as habits I was trying to break or make. In my writing process history, I would say it aligns evenly with how anyone would brainstorm a topic. The only difference was writing it all down on paper. Writing using paper was a huge learning curve and although it wasn’t particularly enjoyable, it was still a challenge to overcome which shaped me as a better writer through that experience. By having the set deadlines for each word count of our project made my writing all better. I could easily see my thought process and connect back to my drafts. It was also nice to not be writing over the drafts, but keeping them as their separate pieces. The instructions for all writing assignments were very clear and it was easy to construct writing based on that. I want to spotlight the amount of time spent on each project, and the structure in general. Even though I’m sure this is what most people are saying about their writing improvement too, it still resonates with me completely. I used to sit down and write the whole essay in a span of 1-3 days. Not too much revision, but enough to make my point clear and get the assignment done. Being able to write and have a clear cut off, submit it, and come back to it in a day or two helped a lot. Taking these breaks was beneficial to me so my mind could take a rest and hopefully generate better writing. Then writing up to 800, taking a break, then up to 1200, then peer review, etc. The structure was majorly beneficial. Moving forward I will definitely try this method of writing in chunks, I can see that helping my writing a lot even for scientific papers. Specifically this project I feel that my efforts remained the same if not more. I could see in each paper making more effort to reevaluate my work. Project 3 I believe has the most effort, especially with my graded work and feedback from my other essays.
I found the writing process on this project more difficult compared to the other projects. Trying to juggle 4 different sources while also adding my own commentary made it really hard to stay focused and not go off on a tangent. Writing the other projects was easier because we had one main article to focus on. But looking back, if I had pushed myself to spend a little more time refining the draft, I probably would have said things in a clearer, more thoughtful way. The topic itself wasn’t bad, but in the beginning, I found it very time consuming to find all the connections these different authors had. It felt like Overall, I think I put a good effort into the project. It just didn’t end up being as put together as I would’ve liked. But what I got from the other projects is I was able to use some of the things I learned from my peer reviews and teacher corretions to help make my project 3 stronger in every way.
11 thoughts on “JOURNAL # 29”
This is a test comment from Joby.
Overall, this project was quite unique to any other writing assignment I’ve had to complete. I found it interesting that I had to integrate the work of my peers into my own argument. To begin this project, I first selected the foundational text I wanted to work with. I knew I had some interest diving deeper into this idea of technological distraction and how this is effecting human behavior. With this theme in mind that I wanted to grapple with, I gravitated towards Sam Anderson’s piece. This text was also especially intriguing to me because I had yet to use it in the preceding projects. After selecting Anderson and reviewing my annotations, I dove into the student narratives and found excerpts written by my peers that aligned with my own thoughts, or aligned or complicated what Anderson was arguing. In the end, I landed on using Katie McGuire and Faith Santiago’s writing. Then, before jumping right into the writing process I made an outline and pulled all the quotes from the three perspectives that I wanted to work with. This really helped me find areas where they were “speaking” to one another. This process of creating an outline was a new tool I employed for this project specifically and I am so happy I did. Project #3 really developed my ability to synthesize my ideas with others and incorporate many voices in a relatively concise amount of words. I would like to highlight my ability to make a very focused claim that guides my paper and my ability to give thoughtful comments on the work of my peers. Some areas of improvement that were illuminated by Project #3 was a lack of balance of the “they say, I say” throughout my writing. There were areas in my essay lacked my personal views on the argument. Adding more of my own personal analysis will allow my writing to gain a new level of strength and will make my argument more persuasive.
Reflecting on my time in this class, I can say that I have seen significant progress in my writing abilities. Specifically, I feel as though my analysis of quotes has gotten far more extensive. In other writing classes, and even in the early projects in this class, I feel as though many of my quotes were just placed into my paper and forgotten about. I did not spend much time analyzing the quotes and inserting myself into the conversation and provided where I stand on the subject. I feel as though in later projects, specifically 2 and 3, I took a larger place in the conversation. Instead of wasting critical word space blabbering, just trying to fill the page, I included thoughtful words to further the overall paper. An obstacle that I had to overcome was receiving constructive criticism. With peer review being such an important aspect of this course, I had to learn that the feedback from my peers was meant to be helpful, not critical. In the past I was never one to put too much emphasis into what others said about my writing. Probably egotistical of me, but I would always feel as though what I put on the page is what needed to be on the page. This course has shown me the importance of peer review and just how influential it can be in my growth as a writer. With this being said, I was happy with the emphasis that I placed on my revision. I took what my peers had to say in mind and went through each of their annotations and adjusted my paper accordingly. In my future writing assignments in this course and in other courses, I will look to eliminate any form of procrastination. I believe this was something I mentioned in the last reflection, but it is still an issue that I need to work on. Far too often I would find myself putting off the assignments because I would find something better to do, and at my worst moments, putting off working on my assignment to the next half hour, ¾ hour, or hour as I continued my TikTok or any other social media app I could push my attention to. I believe that to combat this issue, I am going to set goals for myself. For example, I will say “In the next 45 minutes, I want to reach 500 words”. I feel as though doing this will insure that I am able to complete my assignments with as little distraction as posssible.
I feel my writing process for this essay was a lot messier than my past projects. Prior to this project, I was aiming to put my words into the perfect formatting right away. For example, I would not start my body paragraphs until I had a complete intro and a solid thesis, even though the last two times I did this, I ended up going back and changing my thesis quite a bit. For this project, I developed a more “choppy” way of writing, but I think it was beneficial in helping me not get writer’s block, and I was able to develop a lot of solid ideas that I would’ve been delayed in developing if I took my more rigid approach. During this essay, I feel like I had a stronger grasp on how to place two writers in conversation with each other. I came into this project a little nervous about how to place two authors who agree with each other into conversation, but I feel that having the experience from project 2 gave me a good foundation on how to do this. During revision, I was very focused on making sure that I had a good balance of they say/I say, especially taking into account how I also had to place the authors in conversation with each other. I put my phone across the room from me and took at least 30 minutes dissecting each of my paragraphs, and wrote down where exactly I was placing my sources in conversation, and where I was adding my own input. Doing this really helped me make sure that the ideas that I wanted to convey were actually coming through, and when they weren’t I knew to go back and revise. I think my biggest struggle, which I am sensing is a pattern in all of my writing, is using overly complex sentences, and creating a lot of run-ons. As I begin writing, I more or less dump all of my thoughts onto the page, without regard for how well written they are. It’s helpful for when I need to hit the word counts for the drafts, but is a huge pain to revise when I realize that I have to rewrite most of my sentences. In the future, I plan to help fix his habit by making sure I slow down my brain in order to ensure that I’m writing more thoughtful words, and also to trust myself and have confidence that I am being clear with my writing so I don’t feel the need to over explain myself.
The writing process for this last project was somewhat different than what I have done before. Obviously, this project shared similar ideas to our last project, but I felt like what I had to say played more of a role. When I began this project, I spent my time compiling ideas from the essay’s that my classmates had wrote and comparing them to one of the author’s that I had previously read about. I then proceeded to make a rough draft with the three authors of my choice, but this essay felt different. Since I had plenty of time to think of ideas to write about, I felt as though my essay was less forced and more personal. Even though I did not like having to turn in rough drafts with different word counts, I found that it helped me by preventing procrastination. This class has taught me how to use a new writing format to my advantage and how it can make my argument stronger. This class was also able to teach me about metacommentary and even though I have previously been taught to use my own perspective, I felt like my writing was stronger once I knew what I was doing. Using my own personal evidence to my advantage truly helped strengthen my paper. Meeting the deadline for this project was very easy because I spaced out each rough draft perfectly so that I never felt rushed. Even though I do not like writing in class, I found myself enjoying writing about this topic and furthering my argument. Something that felt super successful for me was having a thesis that flowed throughout the paper, as well as having interesting topic sentences. I tend to struggle with transitions and topic sentences, so it was interesting when I felt like that was my strength during this project. I was very proud of myself during this project for not procrastinating. Due to my topic at hand, I really enjoyed making my argument stronger and finding solid evidence that gave purpose to my project. One thing that I felt like I struggled with was staying on topic. Since this was something that I enjoyed writing about, I found myself writing more than I needed to and it did not help my argument. Another thing that I struggled with was making my sentences too wordy. I think that when I write, I get so lost in my own thoughts that I do not actually realize that what I am saying sounds redundant. Overall, my efforts for this project was much better and I really enjoyed diving deeper into this topic than my last project.
I found this project to be quite difficult in comparison to the last two projects. I felt that with the addition of three different sources, plus your own commentary on top of that, it was very difficult to get my entire point across without rambling too hard. With the writing process, I do not think I did a very good job this time. I finished most of the essay very early in the writing process and because of that, I did not have any motivation to return to the paper to add to it very much. I felt that if I had worked on this essay a little bit more on my own, then I would have had a little more thoughtful words in my essay. The topic overall was fine, I felt that in some cases in the beginning of drafting it was difficult to find voices that spoke to each other and to the article that I chose for the essay. The overall process was not very intriguing this time and that Is mostly due to the fact that I finished most of the essay early on and did not want to do more of it at all. I feel though that my efforts to this project are very strong, just not very polished.
I have finished many papers for both humanity and scientific writing, and the ones we have done for this class have been interesting to say the least. I do not consider myself the strongest writer or creator of ideas, but I was able to open up to a new style of creating a narrative piece from unknown authors. For this recent project, I think I may have taken it in a different direction than some of the other authors in the class, which may not have been an overall bad thing, but just different. My approach to writing seems to be a little different in general, as I can sometimes find it difficult to locate something that is close to the topic but also not being rude or disruptive to the associated topic. That was a challenge this semester when using the compare methods of the previous 2 essays. I wanted to make sure to have a decent enough argument while making sure to have the basic formatting complete. Everyone has their own way of writing which was very interesting to see how they grew and evolved over the semester. The peer editing sessions allowed us to see what folks tried to change or how they may have had a new approach to a problem, and it was good to see how they did that. After this semester, I don’t see myself writing too many essays in the style like we have been doing for this semester. My line of work just doesn’t have this kind of standard. But I will definitely keep in mind the different styles and techniques we have gone over, especially the stuff surrounding how we are able to weigh each portion of the paper and being able to have equal enough proportions to make a solid argument from every direction. I have always struggled with this in the past. A decent portion of essays I have completed in the past, looking back now, I believe that they were a bit disproportional with how much of one side is added and not so much the other. I often find a tangent or niche bit of information that I relate to more than another and will carry that through a good portion of the essay, and really just washing out narrative and arguments from the other side. Looking back on the semester, if I had to change anything about my writing style I would probably focus more on the evaluation of others’ ideas. By not having more I did this and I think that, it may help defend the arguments in a circular manner and have a more balanced essay.
The process of writing this project compared to the other two was much different. Obviously, for the first project, it was easy enough; there was only one text to work off of. For project 2, we had to choose two of the essays we had discussed. However, for project 3, we had to pick two essays written by peers and one essay that we went over in class, and put them all in conversation. This proved to be very challenging as no two peer-written essays held the same viewpoint, not only that, but finding two peer-written essays that had enough in common with each other and also had enough in common with whatever essay we chose from in class. Usually, getting these projects turned in on time is no problem for me; however, this one was problematic for me. I was having a hard time finding texts that worked well together, and I wasn’t ever truly happy with any of the ones I put together. Honestly, my biggest success with this project will be if I manage to pull it together and get it turned in as a finished product on time. Like I said before, this project has been a bit of a struggle for m,e and I am completely the one to blame, I’m writing this reflection the day the project is due and the project still isn’t finished. If I could change one thing about how I went about this project, I would listen to myself from the previous project self-reflections and stop procrastinating. And at this point in school, I realize that my chronic procrastination probably won’t go away because it’s just how I process and do work. For example, I have put off just about every assignment I have gotten this year until the last minute, pulling my hair out, especially this project.
This project was a very different set up than my last ones. I enjoyed reading my peers’ essays and finding quotes from their writing. I chose Turkle because I felt strongly about connecting her piece to two of my peers. She covers a lot of areas but out of all of the articles the one that interests me the most with empathy and feelings. I collected quotes from her research and then my two peers that would work well together. Throughout my writing I changed some of my quotes. I made lists for both of the student writing and compared points to turkle that I thought were similar and I knew I would be able to include my I say. However after my peer review I realized that I didn’t include any personal experience so when editing I had a lot to add in. However I felt that it was easy because I was able to relate to my peers, especially Tyler’s writing. In this essay I felt like I really focused on peer review and benefited out of it. In my last essay I somewhat brushed off what my peers would say and fixed some things. I also found that I procrastinated much less than my Project 2 and I think it has to do with finding a lot of interest in trying to connect three people in conversation. I also felt like I put a lot of effort into the little steps of this project which made me feel more successful. This made meeting the deadlines and word counts for each step much easier as I had struggled with that in the past. The only thing I felt like was a big struggle was not making my writing cluttered since I had so much I wanted to talk about and use from each writing piece. I enjoyed that I was able to build off of my last projects well because the topics were all related. I was able to advance my writing skills with all of the new techniques I had learned throughout the class so far. Compared to my last projects I felt like I trusted myself so much more in this one and was able to get through it with less overthinking than my last ones. I had more thoughts to add to the page instead of just trying to meet the word count. Overall this project felt very interesting and I was super happy that I did not procrastinate much.
My specific process in writing with the theme, Writing and Technology, I felt that it was easiest to dig deep in myself and then outwardly relate those feelings to the text I was learning about. During our first assignment we were asked to write freely about what comes to mind with the topic of writing and technology, and I immediately went into personal experience. I talked about how I was raised and how it affected me, as well as habits I was trying to break or make. In my writing process history, I would say it aligns evenly with how anyone would brainstorm a topic. The only difference was writing it all down on paper. Writing using paper was a huge learning curve and although it wasn’t particularly enjoyable, it was still a challenge to overcome which shaped me as a better writer through that experience. By having the set deadlines for each word count of our project made my writing all better. I could easily see my thought process and connect back to my drafts. It was also nice to not be writing over the drafts, but keeping them as their separate pieces. The instructions for all writing assignments were very clear and it was easy to construct writing based on that. I want to spotlight the amount of time spent on each project, and the structure in general. Even though I’m sure this is what most people are saying about their writing improvement too, it still resonates with me completely. I used to sit down and write the whole essay in a span of 1-3 days. Not too much revision, but enough to make my point clear and get the assignment done. Being able to write and have a clear cut off, submit it, and come back to it in a day or two helped a lot. Taking these breaks was beneficial to me so my mind could take a rest and hopefully generate better writing. Then writing up to 800, taking a break, then up to 1200, then peer review, etc. The structure was majorly beneficial. Moving forward I will definitely try this method of writing in chunks, I can see that helping my writing a lot even for scientific papers. Specifically this project I feel that my efforts remained the same if not more. I could see in each paper making more effort to reevaluate my work. Project 3 I believe has the most effort, especially with my graded work and feedback from my other essays.
I found the writing process on this project more difficult compared to the other projects. Trying to juggle 4 different sources while also adding my own commentary made it really hard to stay focused and not go off on a tangent. Writing the other projects was easier because we had one main article to focus on. But looking back, if I had pushed myself to spend a little more time refining the draft, I probably would have said things in a clearer, more thoughtful way. The topic itself wasn’t bad, but in the beginning, I found it very time consuming to find all the connections these different authors had. It felt like Overall, I think I put a good effort into the project. It just didn’t end up being as put together as I would’ve liked. But what I got from the other projects is I was able to use some of the things I learned from my peer reviews and teacher corretions to help make my project 3 stronger in every way.