Nicolette Schwab

Ms. Cohl & Ms. Shmidt

FIQUS-10005-HA9

19th November

When I was young, books were my secret hideaway. I loved to get lost in the tales and fables that made my imagination run wild with ideas of the impossible. I always admired the way that writers could have such a profound effect on so many people and I knew one day, I would want to affect someone with my words in the same way. The love for books and novellas developed into a love for literature. In doing this I came to find that every author had their own unique voice and flow in their writing. This course allowed me to push this idea even deeper in appreciation for every authors distinctive tone. I beginning analyzing, admiring, and questioning author’s purpose, genre, intended audience, and the author’s stance within their writings. This shift made me not only analyze other writers works with more intensity, but also pushed me to do the same with myself.

Throughout the years I enjoyed writing and often did it for my own pleasure, but I found that I often struggled trying to balance making my own voice clear in my writings and fully addressing, with the prompt that was being asked to write on. Starting this semester I thought that I wrote in a very clear, coherent manner. As I looked at my writing under a more focused scope, I realized that I wrote in a very descriptive way, making my writing seem muddled and not as sharp for the kinds of essays I was assigned to write in school. This realization is what I hope is going to shift my writing from casual to scholarly in the years to come.

        Coming into this course I knew that I wanted to be viewed as a writer from a problem-solver to a problem-explorer. I knew that I could write a standard research paper for a class, but I wanted my writings to do more than inform. I wanted to have my reader stop and think as they are reading my works, evoking questions and making the reader become dynamic were both aspects that I wanted to be brought out in my writings. I also wanted to make the shift from being a boundary-garter, not heavily researching and questioning my writing and ultimately being satisfied with my writing too easily, to being considered a boundary-crosser in my writings. Pushing myself to become a boundary-crosser encouraged me to never settle with my writing and always be looking for ways to improve. This came with a new appreciation for the drafting process of writing papers. Previously I would try to sit down and write and editing an essay in one sitting. This course taught me that not giving time to pass in between my writing was harming my works more than aiding me  I was looking at the prompt and my writing in a one-dimensional way, with one perspective.

        I learned very early on in this course that at the base of everything in an essay was in the thesis. Once I understood this, I felt it was much easier to brainstorm my essays because the thesis always had to be the center focus. I found myself doing significantly more brainstorming as well as criticizing my essay from more specific angles throughout this semester. I found it extremely helpful to make flow charts of how I wanted to shape my essay, this helped my writing have more fluidity while at the same time maintaining a solid structure. In these flow charts I would attempt to make sure that I was including all the elements which would leave the effect of rhetorical situation on my reader. This included making sure that my purpose came across in multidimensional ways so that it could reach several kinds of audiences and readers.                              

With my purpose, which I tried to incorporate into the thesis and introduction portion of my writings, I attempted to make sure that my stance coincided with my purpose and further bolstered it rather than overpowering the purpose of the assignment. I found that when I wrote with a highly descriptive and figurative voice, my stance and tone would often mislead the reader from my central claim, during the peer review sessions this became apparent to me within the first peer editing. After I felt that my stance and purpose were reflecting one another I went to the core of the assignment and had to determine who was my known-audience, and who was my unknown audience. Once I determined this I was able to interweave my information and opinion into the writing assignment with the confidence that my reader would not be in the dark nor drooling over my writings. Finding this balance between over-explaining and creating thought invoking writings for my reader was one of the most difficult aspects of this course that I feel I am starting to master. The last thing that I centered my flow charts around was genre

The first essay of the year that we wrote was the “Personal Narrative”. When I read over the prompt I had a very clear vision in my mind about what story I was going to do and how I was going to emphasize the main points of the prompt through descriptive imagery. After we had the peer review and I had talked about my paper with my group members, I realized that the reader got lost in all of the description of the story that the key features did not come across. When I went about revising and re editing my paper I decided to scratch everything and start from a completely new story. I was under the impression that none of my previous draft was salvageable and that I needed to start from a fresh perspective to effectively answer the prompt. Looking back I believe that if I had just reworked my original draft instead of writing a completely new essay, my paper would have been stronger and I wouldn’t have felt as directionless with my purpose for writing the essay. I was not happy with my grade on this essay which made me take revising my papers much more seriously than I had ever in the past. The largest take away from this assignment for me was the shift in my perspective from thinking that essays are something that you do in one sitting rather than continuously going back and reworking it until it comes across as bold and clear.

After we got deeper into the course we started focusing on aspects of writing like audience, stance, purpose, and genre which helped me shape my “Exploratory Essay”. Once I gained a better understanding of the course and had done more readings in the Norton Textbook I felt that I could better formulate an outline that would be effective in making sure I include all of the requirements of the prompt. For the exploratory essay I tried to create a very strong thesis and then make sure that at the end of every paragraph it portrayed how that paragraph pertained to the thesis. This made it a much smoother process when I went to write the first draft of my essay. One challenge of this essay was the incorporation of secondary sources. I was struggling with making these secondary sources known to the reader throughout my essay but after I met with my professor and went over proper format, and took her suggestions for how to weave in direct quotes from the secondary sources, I felt much more confident. My “Exploratory Essay” emphasized the idea that for an essay to be powerful, there needs to be a long revision process. Something that I learned while writing my “Exploratory Essay” was that for a paper that has secondary sources it is very important to do extensive research on the topic and be open to the idea that as I’m writing my essay I may find more credible and topic centered information. I found that before this course I would typically approach a research paper by picking out my sources prior to writing the paper, then I would shape the essay based off of the sources. By writing the essay while researching topics I found that my essay was much more powerful in purpose and pertaining to the appropriate audience.

With the finial essay of the semester I was feeling more optimistic about the “Critical Analysis” assignment and was counting on my grade being the highest out of the three essays I had written in this course. At first my plan for the critical analysis essay was to build off of the “Exploratory Essay” and use some of the same sources/ideas. After talking to both of my professors for the course I decided that I would have a stronger essay if I wrote on a broader and deeper topic. This made me start from scratch, my first step was formulating a thesis and then extensively researching the topic to bolster my thesis throughout the essay. What stumped me about the “Critical Analysis” essay was the purpose, I was very confused about how to incorporate literary devices into my thesis and entire essay. I went through a process of trial and error with my thesis until I felt like I had a thesis that took a stance about what the author of the primary texts was portraying while at the same time not being objective about the topic. I found that having a lot of outside opinion on this paper was very helpful in shaping an essay that was relative to the intended audience. For this essay I would often rewrite entire sections based off of my peers comments and try and take on their point of view and what I would want them to take away from my writing. I found I made the most amount of revisions and spent the longest amount of time editing my “Critical Analysis” essay and that is the essay that I feel the most confident about. The “Critical Analysis” essay made me think more about different types of genres and how they are coming out in my essay. In thinking about my genre I thought more about the kind of reaction I was looking to get from my reader, this helped me from my stance that I was writing on and also made me have a clearer unique voice throughout this paper which made my thesis even more powerful.

The largest shift that I see in my writing over this semester is that my writing has become much more specific in terms of pertaining to the prompt which in turn made my essays more compelling and captivating for the reader. A key editing skill that I have started using and will likely continue using through all my writing is going through each paragraph and seeing if I only read that paragraph, if I would be able to understand my thesis and get a grasp of the assignment asked. By doing this it has helped me tremendously stay on task as well as make my writing more direct and allows my purpose for my writing to be less confusing to the reader. I also saw a large change in myself this semester in terms of being more comfortable with having peers edit and read through my work. This used to be a major struggle for me and part of the reason why I was also so uncomfortable with editing my own papers. I have come to realize that outside opinion is just as vital to shaping a paper as your own because your audience holds a great weight in terms of how the paper should be shaped.

As my first semester of college is coming to a close, I start to look back on how my writing has transformed over the course of the semester and what strengths I look forward to exploring as well as what obstacles I need to work on. This semester I focused on perspective as a writer, not only did I focus on the perspective in writing from, but I also learned to take into consideration the perspective of my audience. This allowed my writing to transform into something that the reader felt they were interested in and could connect to. Becoming more conscious of the reader made me go even further in my writing and made me start thinking about vital aspects of writing like the tone, genre, and stance that I am writing in. Through becoming more aware of my writing, I felt that I grew as a writer and can see that growth throughout the course of the semester.