Publishing Project #4

I will publish my fourth project below:

August 12, 2015

Dear Professor Bottai and Peers:

Five weeks have gone by and unfortunately the course is drawing near its conclusion.  Viewing various types of texts and determining their overall effectiveness has opened my mind to the world of writing. While in high school, I matured as a writer every year that went by and as time progressed, so did the strength of the skills I acquired.  This course, in particular, helped incorporate those skills to be able to write in a different perspective.  After the first week I was already able to carefully analyze scientific texts.  The extent of this knowledge was imperative to aiding my growth not only as a student, but as a person.  Using the university’s library database was the most critical tool at my disposal.  It enhanced my ability to learn about ways to research different controversial topics.  Constantly revising projects helped improve my writing style and effectiveness of appealing to an audience.  I grasped the concept of producing work without explicitly expressing my own personal beliefs.  The challenges presented in this course is the foundation for the future ahead of me.  The fast approaching deadlines required projects to be published within a specific time constraint and consequently, this has pushed me harder than ever before.  

In my first blog post, I was asked to state my writing process and how my perspective has changed throughout the course.  To help express my process from the first few days of class, here is a quote from my blog post titled, “Revisiting My Writing Process”, in which I wrote, “As this course comes to an end, I would consider my writing process to equally be a sequential composer and a heavy reviser” (My Blog Post #52).  Surprisingly, my writing process has not changed from the start of class. Procrastination is and will not be a part of my work regimen.  One process that I want to shift my focus, is spending more time planning out my work prior to writing it. Transitioning from high school to college has been an eye-opening process.  Work completed this summer has given me the opportunity to learn in an online setting more than ever before.    

In high school I never deeply analyzed sources that I would use in my writing.  This course has given the unique opportunity to view numerous journals, articles, and websites.  As a result, I gained a much needed improvement to my ability to interpret what authors use in their work and incorporate those skills into my own work.  As an example, the research done in my first project’s annotated bibliography included ten sources which helped me produce the work I needed to successfully analyze a controversy. Annotated bibliographies were never a requirement for my previous English courses and it is a shame they were not.  They may not seem necessary for some individuals, but for me they simplified the process of completing my project by not having to struggle to search for information in each source.  

Two of the four objectives of this course in which I believe I did not execute as well as I planned were rhetorical awareness and conventions.  Although I progressed in my ability to include rhetorical awareness in my work, improvements still need to be made of the way I adapt to a specific convention in a particular genre and appeal to readers who have experience viewing the genres.  With more practice in writing, I will have an easier time understanding strategies that are used in various texts. One crucial strategy is identifying a purpose that appeals to an audience.  One of the objectives in which I encountered less issues was utilizing the essential skills learned from previous courses to critically think about a topic I am researched.  This type of thinking made the process of composing my own writing much easier.  Reflections of my own work presented invaluable experiences that can be used in the years of work ahead of me.

My approach to writing either blogs or major projects included similar situations.  I briefly planned out what I would write and then move on to sequentially composing individual parts of the work.  Revision was a key process to success in this course.  Without careful revision, I do not believe I would have gotten the results that I did.  The peer review process was the cornerstone of the revision process.  My job as an editor and more importantly, your job as the peer reviewer significantly helped me when the time came to publish the final versions of my projects.  Rather than be insulted at your comments,  I viewed them as favors.  Consequently, your reviews paved the way for the completion of work, and I thank you for that.

The first few days of this course truly opened up my eyes in terms of what a heavy workload is.  While in high school school, none of the college courses I took were English courses.  As a result, I never had an idea of how much work needs to put in to successfully power through a course such as this one.  There have always been times where I have faced difficulties in my English courses.  Not until last year, and this class in particular, did I begin to realize that there is no point in complaining about the type of work I am given and how much work I need to complete in order to get the highest possible grade.  Instead, I took it upon myself to frame the thought into my mind that by working to the best of my abilities, good results will ensue.  

What this course has done for me is something I have never seen in school before.  To be able to say that I have completed an honors English college course over the summer and take one with such bright-minded individuals, is a thought that I never envisioned.  The knowledge gained from this course will not only help me complete my college coursework, but will be the reason why I will have success in my writing in the future.  I want to personally say that this journey has been a tough one for me, but it only marks the beginning of a long and tedious experience.  Regardless of what you brilliant individuals go on to do in your lives, just remember one thing, BEAR DOWN!

Yours Sincerely,

Brandon Goldenberg    

       

Victory Lap

Congratulations to all of my peers who will complete this course by Wednesday!

Ritt, Stefan. "Canada's fireworks at the 2013 Celebration of Light in Vancouver, BC". 1 August 2013 via Wikipedia Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

Reflection on Open Letter Draft

For this blog post I will on my peers' feedback on my open letter draft.  I will hyperlink the two drafts I read from my peers. For the remainder of my blog post I will answer six questions from the Student's Guide on page 69.  This will help tell me what I will revise in my open letter draft.

Dtcdthingy~commonswiki. "Reflecting pool". 4 April 2005 via Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported  

The letters I have reviewed from my peers were from Jason Wittler and Mark Mellott.

Who specifically, is going to be reading this essay?  Or who am I trying to reach with my argument?  (My instructor, my classmates, members of my academic community, members of the local community, etc.)
The readers of my letter is my instructor and my peers.  They are the individuals that have stuck throughout the entirety of this course.  We all worked hard through the good times and difficult times.

What biases might my readers have?  Am I respecting their opinions while also achieving my own purpose?
The only bias which I believe my peers and I share is that we all worked hard throughout this course and we will all have specific opinions on this thought when we read the letters of our peers.  My purpose was to show I have improved as a reader and writer and how I have gained invaluable knowledge.  The good part of what I wrote in my letter is that I respect the ideas of my peers and as a result I will not need revise what I wrote.

What are their values and expectations?  Am I adequately meeting those expectations?
The readers of my letter expect to read about specific information in which we have improved as students.  I can't speak about what other students wrote in their letters but I can say that mine includes my own work to show how I became a better student.  We all have different examples that we use in our letters, but we share a similarity of including our own personal examples of the ways we evolved as readers and writers.  My letter meets the exceptions of these individuals by showing how we all collectively had to work on the same projects.

How much information do I need to give my audiences?  How much background information or context should I provide for them without insulting their expertise?
In my first draft of my letter I included a brief amount of information of how I connected my personal information with the content of work in this course.  I plan on providing more information while at the same time not stating background information that insults the expertise these individuals with the topic of English.

What kind of language is suitable for this audience?
I will use language that is relevant to this specific course and the work involved with it.  The audience already knows what kind of work has been completed, so I need to refrain from using information that is not relevant to this course.

What tone should I use with my audience?  Do I use this tone consistently throughout my draft?
My tone should be one which is happy and cheerful, while at the same time being reflective of the work that was put into this course.  I should also keep my background information relative to the content of my letter.  In my first draft, I believe that I did a good job of using a tone that satisfies all of the conditions just mentioned.

Overall, I just want to revise the way I structure my sections and have them relate to the main idea stated in my introduction paragraph.

Draft of Open Letter

For this blog post I will write a short paragraph addressed to my peer reviewers for my open letter draft.  I will tell them what they should know about my draft and what they will be reading over.  At the end of this post I will provide a working link to my letter in Google Docs.

O'Leary, Marianne. "NFL Draft 2010 stage at Radio City Music Hall". 25 April 2010 via Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

For the draft of my open letter I want you as my peer reviewers to focus on a few things in my writing.  I will address the points of my experiences, either good or bad, of my writing experiences while in high school.  I will write about the same experiences I have had with other college coursework.  Similarly, I will address the writing situations I expect to face in the future, either for this fall semester or the remaining years at the U of A.  I will use the answers I composed in my blog post #53 to help me write the open letter.  I will quote directly from my blog posts to help compose my open letter.  I will also use drafts and final versions of my major projects, comments made either from my peers or myself for the major projects, and texts and materials I have used either from the books we used in the course or websites I encountered while working on my major projects, to help compose the remainder of my letter.

Here is a link to my working Google Docs for my open letter draft:

Reflecting on My Writing Experiences

For this blog post I will answer 14 bulleted items on pages 251 and 252 in the Student's Guide.

Chensiyuan. "Lincoln memorial reflecting pool". 4 April 2007 via Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic, and 1.0 Generic 

Here are the aspects to reflect on my writing:

1. Your assumptions and ideas about writing before taking your first-year composition courses                                                                                                                                             Prior to beginning this course I thought I had a good understanding of what it takes to conquer an English course.  I will have to admit, the first three days of this course kicked my butt.  Instead of pouting on my bed, I matured into a hard-working individual and took it upon myself to acknowledge that I am taking an honors course in the summer.  Not that there is anything wrong with this, but with this title, comes more responsibility.  I took a good look in the mirror and told myself that I will get through this class by doing my best and not quitting.  So far, the speech I told myself has worked.  Doing my best and not quitting are two important qualities people should have.                                                                                                                                                            
2. The most important lessons you have learned as both a reader and a writer as a result of taking your first-year composition courses                                                                                 As a reader, I have learned from this course that in order to fully grasp the information in a text, you must not only carefully read it, but read it a few times.  Doing this will only help you understand the purpose of the text and have an easier explaining it if necessary.  As a writer, I have learned that practice, some planning, revision, and constant work will result in a better grade than procrastinating.  Although I do not personally procrastinate, many people in this world suffer from it and as a result do not succeed in a way that they envision.                                                                                                                                                                                          
3. The ways you brainstormed, narrowed down topic, and worked on thesis statements          By writing an original thesis statement and then usually sticking to my second draft of it, is the plan that I used when writing my projects.  Planning prior to writing them was an important step for me to even think of ways to approach what I will say.  As far as narrowing down the topic, I did this by already having a thesis statement in mind and then making sure that it was relative to an audience and how they would be represented in my projects.                                                                                                                                                                         
4. The peer-review process, including what you offered and what you received                         I thought the peer-review process was a beneficial process to completing each project.  Corrections from my peers was a necessary aspect to improving my projects.  Without this, I do not feel that I would change as much in my projects because I would be too kind to myself.  Seeing what I wrote in a different set of eyes helped me not only improve my revision, but my overall outlook to completing projects.                                                                                                                                                                
5. Individual or small-group conferences with your instructor                                                      The rubrics provided after each project was completed helped me realize what my mistakes were and how I can improve my writing in the future.  Also, videos in the beginning of the course helped me get a clearer idea of what was expected throughout this course.  Overall, some form of communication helped me in this course.                                                                                                                                                                
6. The discussions you had about your paper with people who were not in your class               By asking a parent to look over my completed projects, I was able to get another person to review my projects without having my advice by their side.  They could quietly fix any errors that were in my projects.  Having more than three reviewers helped me in a big way to improve my projects from my first drafts to my last.                                                                                                                                                                       
7. How you approached the revision process for each essay                                                         Reviewing the comments from my peers helped me formulate better methods on fixing the specific details that needed to be addressed in my projects.  Revising individual sections of my projects was the best way, I thought, on how to fix my projects in their entirety.                                                                                                                                                             
8. Your understanding of reading and writing in different genres                                               Reading and writing in different genres helped convince me that messages of a topic can still get across in any format that its written in.  Viewing different authors' texts in different settings helped me find the true essence of creating a useful and persuasive thesis statement.                                                                                                                                                                      
9. What you would do differently if you were to take your first-year composition courses again                                                                                                                                               The only knock that I have on myself is spending a bit more time planning out my projects to ensure that I do not have to over-do the revising.  Revision is important, but over-doing it can affect how you perceive your overall paper.  Thinking too much about one sentence can affect the overall flow of the project.  That's why more planning prior to writing can help reduce some of these issues.                                                                                                                                                                   
10. How college writing fits into your life now and how it will fit into your major and future career                                                                                                                                                College writing has helped me have a better understanding of how analyze sources and interpret them in a way that I can get the most amount of information out of them.  This can help me in the future as I will have to analyze different scientific texts and use them to help me write my thesis for my bachelor's degree.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  The following questions might help develop a thesis statement for my reflective essay:                      
11. What did you learn (from a specific writing assignment, from a specific experience, or from the semester as a whole)?                                                                                                     More than any other English course I have ever taken, this one has taught me how to formulate a thesis statement and keep in mind how I will successfully address the purpose of what I will write about and how an audience will be addressed.  Doing this is one of the most important parts to writing a text, as it sets up the rest of the text.  Without a clear thesis statement and how an audience is perceived, the text might not flow as well, let alone even make sense.                                                                                                                                                             
12. Did the choices you made, or writing experiences you had, reinforce something you already knew about yourself or about writing?                                                                         Researching a lot prior to starting my projects helped me a lot.  Surfing through many texts and choosing the best one can be a hard task to complete.  The only way to do it is to be patient and be able to make an effort to set your mind to it and complete it.  Without informative sources, the project itself will not be a thorough and may leave an audience feeling lost an uninformed throughout the project.                                                                                                                                                                 
13. If you did not gain as much from a particular project as you had hoped, what are the possible reasons for that and what might you do differently the next time?                           The good part about this question is that, in my opinion, I believe I have learned as much I needed to write a good enough project.  I put about the same amount of time into researching the topic I will write about for all of my projects.  As a result, I feel that I wrote longer, but more informative texts in this course.                                                                                                                                                                  
14. Think about the course objectives listed on your syllabus as you consider your success in the class.  What course objectives did you meet?  What objectives are you still working on?                                                                                                                                                   As far as the four objectives for this course go, I feel that I have addressed all of them in some way.  In terms of needing more practice for them, I believe that in the future I need to have more rhetorical awareness and a little more practice on conventions.  These are not major issues that I suffer from, but more practice with them will only help me improving as a reader and a writer.  The two objectives I believe I have met are critical thinking and composing and reflection and revision.                                                                                                                                                                     

Revisiting My Writing Process

For this blog post I will revisit my first blog post regarding my writing process and review the different types of writers from the beginning week of this course.  I will reflect on what I wrote for my writing process blog post and explain my perspective has changed from the beginning of the course until now.  I will explain the type of writer I am now and which type I will be moving forward.

G Dmitry. "Dmitry G is repairing tanning bed". 15 June 2013 via Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported 

Reflect on what you wrote in your first blog post and explain how your perspective has or has not shifted during your experience working in this course:

In my first blog post I wrote that I would consider myself a sequential composer.  As this course comes to an end, I would consider my writing process to equally be a sequential composer and a heavy reviser.  I mentioned that I was more of a reviser than a planner in my first blog post, but I did not specifically favor this style over the first type.  After completing my first three projects, I would have to consider myself a writer of two types not just one.  I feel more comfortable writing individual parts to my projects and revising them individually rather than heavily planning them out and writing them in one sitting.  For me consistent revision makes me more comfortable as a writer.

Explain how you would explain your process now and how you see it moving forward:

Moving forward, I do not see myself using more than these two types of processes.  I would definitely not be a procrastinator, since I just do not have a lazy personality.  I always want to complete assignments earlier rather than later.  As far as being a heavy planner, I do not believe that this will serve an important purpose in my future.  Don't get me wrong, planning is one of the most important steps in writing.  I just believe that I will not need to over-do planning and instead would rather over-do revising my papers.

What kind of writer does your experience in this course tell you you're going to be in the next 2 or 3 years of college coursework, looking for employment as you plan graduation, and/or working in your field after graduation?

Since I followed the two types of writing styles that I mentioned in the two previous questions, this will serve me a good purpose in my future coursework in college.  I do not procrastinate when it comes to working.  This is a problem that many individuals deal with everyday.  I like to plan ahead of time, but do not particularly favor overthinking anything that I do.  As I plan for the rest of my years in college and moving on forward toward graduate school, I want to make sure that I improve my writing skills as much as possible.  Even though I will not be taking specific English courses, many of my courses will require some form of writing.  Any practice of this kind will improve not only my knowledge of the subject, but my ability to write more scientific texts.             

Reflection on Project 3

For this blog post I will reflect on my third project by answering nine items on page 520 in Writing Public Lives.

Manske, Magnus. "Reflection on Lake McDonald (7198413770)". 14 November 2013 via Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic 

What was specifically revised from one draft to another?
The common similarity that was shared throughout all drafts was that I did not need to globally change/revise my papers.  To remind readers of what this means; Global revision is completely changing content from one draft to the next.  The main revisions that took place was fixing grammatical errors, changing sentence structures, and punctuation errors.  Along with these, I had to reword the thesis statements in each of my projects.  I had to connect my main points in my body sections so that readers could see a clearer connection of them to the overall message of the project.  I had to make sure that I correctly cited my resources, which included: visuals and tables (graphs and statistical data).

Point to global changes: how did you reconsider your thesis or organization?
Luckily for me, I never had to make global changes to my projects.  I only had to rewrite my thesis statements in my projects so that I could make them more relative to addressing the components for the entire project.  As far organization goes, I had planned out ways to format my projects prior to writing them.  In the end, I planned out my body sections in topic format.  Essentially, I use one major topic per body paragraph and use evidence and analysis of it to complete each section.  

What led you to these changes?  A reconsideration of audience?  A shift in purpose?
After completing my projects I felt that I did not address the audience as well as I should have.  With the same purposes in mind for each project, I wanted to have better connections between the thesis statements and showing an audience is affected by them.  Major changes were not necessary for my projects.  By adding a sentence to my thesis statements I improved my purpose for projects and gave readers an easier time to grasp the main information of what my projects would be.

How do these changes affect your credibility as an author?
Changing information in my projects for the better made my credibility as an author better.  Adding a sentence alone helped create a bigger picture in the minds of my projects' readers.  I did not change my thesis statements by including more statements that showed my own personal bias towards my topics.  Writing without much use or no use of having bias in one's projects will strengthen their credibility and would give readers more appeal to carefully analyze the work.

How will these changes better address the audience or venue?
Specifically mentioning ways that the audience will be addressed in the thesis statements improves the content of the introduction section to the projects.  By not explicitly mentioning specific individuals in the audience, but carefully using words that mention how the audience will be affected in the thesis statements will address the audience in a better way.

Point to local changes: how did you reconsider sentence structure and style?
The only minor local changes was just fixing some punctuation rules (more specifically in project 2).  My first project did not have too many mistakes when it came to sentence structure and the overall format of the paper.  I should have added more visuals to it to make it more appealing to read.  Information was spot on it, but providing variety (in terms of pictures) would have had readers be more interested in it.  My second project followed the style of the genre better than the first project.  Not too many sentence structure changes were needed in it.  My third project perhaps had the most desirable appeal to the audience in terms of formatting the genre.  Since I did a presentation, I included a good amount visuals which attracted the audiences' eyes right away to them.

How will these changes assist your audience in understanding your purpose?
The best example to answer to this question would have to be my third project.  Just after I had provided my thesis statement, I added to slides that briefly described how vaccinations worked.  This is an important addition to my project since it gives unbiased and informative commentary to the overall public argument.  Giving factual information can help assist the audience into reading more of the work and then in the end decide their own opinions.

Did you have to reconsider the conventions of the particular genre in which you are writing?
The only issue that I had with conventions was with the first project.  I did not write my project in true quick reference guide convention.  Although I separated out specific topic headers in my project, I did not make it more appealing to the reader by providing visuals and images to make it easier on the eye.  Since my other projects followed the conventions of their genres pretty well, I did not have reconsider rewriting them.

Finally, how does the process of reflection help you reconsider your identity as a writer?
Reviewing my own writing tells a lot about how I plan and prepare my own projects.  Since I did procrastinate until the last hour to write my projects, I still used the same type of writer style from the beginning of this course.  Reflecting on my writing gives me a better sense of how I write similar projects in a better way, addressing the key components of my prompts.  Practice makes perfect is a saying that I believe is important when it comes to writing.  The more you write the better writer you will become.  Revising is an important process when it comes to growing as a writer.