Learning Outcome #1: Recursive Process
Writing being a recursive process means that it’s not one-and-done. Writing isn’t linear, its cyclical. You don’t start with the introduction and finish when you write the concluding paragraph, writing is a series of writes and rewrites, separated by periods of editing and review. When I was in high school I think I got into the habit of just writing a paper the night before and having that be my final paper, but having mandatory peer review forces you into viewing writing as a recursive process.
For my second paper, the “first draft” I submitted was actually the second draft because I wrote about two and a half pages and realized I didn’t like what I was writing so I started over. This is something I might not have been able to do if I was going to submit the rough draft because of time constraints, but having time to make a second draft significantly helped my writing.
I think there is something to be said about being able to write something and know that it’s not perfect but it doesn’t have to be. For my first paper, I was treating it like a final, making a lot of revisions as I wrote it up. But as the semester continued, I got more comfortable with printing off and showing a paper that I knew had errors in it. By the third paper, my rough draft was mostly
Learning Outcome #6: Global v Local Revisions
What I said at the end of learning outcome #1 is related to the idea of doing global revisions first, and then local revisions afterwards. Global revisions are supposed to be things that effect the paper on a macro-level, for example the paragraph order or even your thesis statement. Local revisions are micro-level changes that are on a sentence by sentence basis, like spelling or word choice.
Focusing on global revisions first saves a lot of time. Why focus so much time and effort on a particular sentence if you’re eventually going to rewrite the entire paragraph. Also, when I focus a lot on particular part of a paper, I don’t want to just erase it after spending so much time on it; and there have been times that I’ve added an extra paragraph or two just to keep in something that I already wrote. Doing local revisions last saves me from having to do this, and is something I believe I got better at during the course of this class.
This concept also comes up in peer review because, while helping your peer with local revisions are important, it is much more beneficial to work with them on their global issues first. Not that everything revolves around a grade, but you and your peer are going to lose a lot more points for a global mistake than a local one.
Learning Outcome #2: Integrating Ideas
Being able to incorporate other people’s ideas into your own in very important for a lot of different ways, not just in English class. Being able to support your own arguments by including ideas from experts and other notable figures is important for other fields like business and politics. Including other people’s ideas into your argument adds credibility, because it gives your argument something to stand on. Even if you had a really good argument, not a lot of people would support it unless it was based around supported solid evidence from other people.
I think it is important to use integrate ideas in more than one way when writing. I think quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing are all great, but if my paper ends up being 40% quotes, I feel like I haven’t included enough of my own thoughts. Similarly, if I end up summarizing an article for 2/3’s of a page I think that’s too much. Finding the write balance is important to making a better paper.
I thought I had a pretty good understanding of how to integrate ideas at the beginning of the semester because I had to write a lot of papers in high school. I don’t know if I got better at integrating ideas, but I think I am a lot more conscious of how I am doing so.
Learning Outcome #5: Citations
Of course, if you are going to incorporate other people’s ideas into your paper then you are going to have to give them credit. If you don’t cite other people’s work when you use it you are stealing their ideas and plagiarizing their work. You can show citations is a couple of different ways, parenthetical citations, footnotes, and a works cited page among them. It doesn’t take a lot of time, and not giving credit will lose you a lot of points.
Adding in-text citations also go towards adding to your arguments credibility, because I can see that you used sources as I am reading. Also, if someone is using a quote, I like to know where the quote is coming from.
I think I have a pretty good understanding of how to do citations. The only thing I’m a little shaky on is putting in a parenthetical citation at the end of a sentence or paragraph when you’ve paraphrased someones ideas. Usually I quote or summarize other authors so I don’t have a lot of experience with this.
My high school had a subscription to EasyBib and NoodleTools which are online citation generators, so my school made it easy to do citations for every paper that we did. We would also have classes in the library’s computer room where the librarians could teach/remind us how to do them if we forgot. I think this has carried over to me understanding the importance of, and knowing how to do, citations
