In writing this essay, my main goal was to take risks in my writing and do things in my writing that I haven't done successfully in the past. I think that a really hard thing for me to do in this essay was to keep out my opinion. If I did throw my opinion in there somewhere, I had to hide it in something that the author of one of the readings said. This was really hard for me because I am a really opinionated person. I think that in my first draft I had a hard time reaching my goals, however, in my second draft I had a better idea of some things that needed to be changed. In the second draft, I think I did a good job of not directly putting my opinion in the essay.
When I was developing my paper, I spent the time brainstorming on paper. I made tables on my paper and I wrote a brief synopsis of each work and then I wrote a short sentence or two about how each work had a connecting theme.
I was definitely able to see my writing changing. In my first draft I was very opinionated, I didn't have many, if any quotes or paraphrases and I didn't have a work cited page. After I revised the essay, I saw a great improvement in the quality of my writing in this paper and I also added the things above that I had left out of the first draft. My peers gave me some really good feedback in my workshop. The main thing that I learned from my peers was that my opinion had too big of a presence in my paper. When I revised the paper, I took out MY opinions. One thing that I have learned about myself as a writer is that I do have the ability for really good writing. With each time that I revise my writing, I notice that it gets better and better. From my peers' writing, I learned some things that I left out of my paper by seeing them in there papers. Also, some things I noticed that they left out of their paper, I pointed out and therefore realized I left those things out of my paper as well. For some reason, the easiest part of my paper was deciding what different readings and/or videos to use as my examples. I started thinking about my essay and the examples that I wanted to use just came to me. However, when I started writing my essay, I had to really dig for the connections between the different works.
Rachel, I am very impressed to see how you worked through your problems to help revise your essay. I am also glad they we got to help expand your thinking on your paper. I found through your post that we had a lot of the same issues while trying to write our papers. I also found it very easy to pick which articles to chose and the common theme between them. However, when attempting to write my paper, I had a difficult time trying to find specific arguments to present in the paper. I found myself reading the articles over and over again searching for any and every connection I could find. Having an outline really helped me to focus and stay on track.
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