D#12, HW#4 - Writing Project Reflections Summary

I slowly learned through my three writing projects how to write for a specific rhetorical context, including identifying my purpose, topic, audience, and writer. This was very difficult, as I did not originally understand what ‘specific rhetorical context’ meant in the beginning. I was finally able to understand this better with reviewing classmate’s papers and revising my own to reflect my understanding. My writing projects one and three primarily reflect this understanding.

Organization is one of my strongest skills. I really enjoyed how the course syllabus laid out each deadline and homework with specific instructions on how to complete each section. I learned how to organize my research using the Toulmin method, which helped tremendously with writing project three. I also learned how to annotate bibliographies and thankfully kept track of these early on. I believe this gave me an advantage when it came time to prepare writing project two.

Consistent voice, tone, diction, grammar, and mechanics are a major struggle for me, with the exception of grammar. I had just completed English 101 and was taught adamantly not to use ‘I’, ‘me’, and ‘you’ throughout each paper I wrote. I needed to overcome this lesson with English 102 and I struggled hard with the concept. I believe I finally achieved this outcome through writing project three. I will always need to work on mechanics, as it too was a minor struggle for me. I tend to avoid using ‘big’ words, mainly relying on easy to understand words. This stems from two things: one, I used to write children’s stories as a hobby and two, as a previous trainer for my current job; I learned using certain words confused others versus helping their understanding. This is something I need to overcome in order to progress in my writing.

My sources through locating, evaluating, citing and integrating into my writing projects were anywhere from easy to difficult. (Sometimes I felt like giving up altogether.) I tried very hard to focus on search terms and evaluating the sources, I located. I ended up ‘book marking’ excessively many sources in the beginning. Towards the end, I finally understood how to work this process better in writing my third project.

APA style is a new technique I learned throughout each writing project I developed. In the beginning, I kept forgetting I was supposed to be using APA versus MLA style. I demonstrated my understanding with APA style strongest in my writing project three, with obvious mistakes corrected from writing project two.

Peer reviews are generally helpful, if participants use the technique for the designed purpose. A peer review is supposed to be objective and constructive criticism. I believe there was confusion when using this technique in the beginning and it seems the process improved throughout the assignments. My only concern with peer review is that there were little to no ‘set guidelines with examples’ on what to write or how to say things. This left open a wide area for human error. Specifically, the opportunity or hazard if you will, unintentionally offending or hurting someone’s feelings. In the future, I would like to learn clearer guidelines on how to use this technique.

Writing strengths for me would include grammar and organization. I’m able to identify and recognize I have a lot of room to improve with mechanics, diction, and tone. Strategies I will utilize for improvement will be setting my word processor to check for all possible mechanic and grammar situations. Recognizing I may need to change these settings depending on the type of document, I want to produce. This feature(s) will help me identify areas I need to reword or reconsider.

Technologies, God bless the ‘computer genius’ that invented computers and their wonderful programs. I really appreciated and had fun learning about blogging, book marking, researching MCC’s online library, and Gmail. I will be using each of these technologies in the future for classes, work projects, and even just for fun.