My “Self Essays”

I think of the three essays which I have written most recently, the Introduction, Reflection, and Conclusion essays, as self essays because they are more personal and the topic is my personal growth and writing process. I like my intro. essay most. I found it fun to write, because it made me take time to sit back and reflect upon my growth as a writer over the years. I found this exercise made me feel good about my writing development, and although I have a very strange and unique writing process I think it is well adapted for my auditory learning style. Overall my only concern with the essays is that there were occasions where I wanted to address Professor Scott directly and I chose to do so with the familiar “you” form. I’m not sure if I want to change this so that the essays could apply to a broader audience or if I want to keep them specific to the class. I think that since she is the primary audience for my portfolio I will not change my pronoun choice. I generalized the three major assignments but I feel that these essay are just to explain my writing style and process to Professor Scott specifically and no one else so it would be silly to say “the reader”.

Per editing

Throughout this year I have struggled with per editing. In the past I have not had much experience with critiquing my peers’ work and with the practice I did have I knew the people and their writing style well so I felt comfortable giving them suggestions. In this class aside from the people in my group I am not well acquainted with individuals and am even less familiar with their writing styles. For this reason I feel awkward responding to many of my peers in this class. I feel like they may take my critiques as a personal offence. I have tried to combat this by including positive feedback as well as suggestions, but I still feel that I may come across rather harsh. I remember receiving papers back in middle school and feeling as though my teacher had torn apart my paper and brutally beating it into the form that she desired. This is what I fear my peers will feel.

Presentations

I was very pleased with how my presentation went. I was surprisingly not as nervous as I had expected. I believe that this was because I felt that I was very well prepared to give my speech; most of it was memorized, and I got up extra early before class to rehearse it a few more time in front of the mirror. All of the feedback slips that I received, both from you and my peers was very positive. It was a great way to finish off a week of exams and projects before heading off for a nice week-long break.

Feedback

I appreciate the feedback I received both from you and my peers. I took your advice and changed the title of my speech to be more specific and used the original abstract one as a sub title. Mostly what my peers found were typos, but they seemed to feel that the tone of my speech was too sophisticated and the word choice too academic. Some felt that it would be better as an essay. However, I think that this is because they were reading a hard copy of the speech and so they felt it was an essay. To test my theory I gave my roommate a hard copy to ready and practiced delivering the speech to one of my friends. The roommate didn't think it should be an essay, but she did comment on the sophistication of the writing, but not in a negative manner. The friend loved the speech and found it easy to follow and the argument clear and compelling. I think that because it is a speech it is difficult to analyse unless it is presented auditorially. I have made changes to areas which I felt were legitimately too wordy and confusing, but I feel that the piece was meant to be a speech and works very well as one.

Speech 11/14

I have finished a fairly decent draft of my speech. I am very pleased that I chose this as my genera because I have found it to be very effective in allowing me to convey my ideas. I feel that I am able to construct more complex and in depth sentences that may otherwise be confusing because I am verbally delivering the speech so I can use pauses, word emphasis, and hand gestures to ensure that my audience is able to follow my though process. I have enjoyed this assignment most and feel that I excel in this forum of communication.

Chosen Genre

I have chosen to deliver a speech for my project. This was a fairly easy genre to research, especially because of the recent elections. I have decided there are two components to every speech, the actual content of the speech and how the speech is delivered. I watched a lot of u-tube videos of famous and non-famous speeches. I feel that the speaker is what really sells a speech to most audiences and he/she is responsible for leaving a positive memorable impression. Many speeches, such as the infamous "I Have a Dream" speech keep the audiences attention by rallying them and getting them excited and energised about the topic.
I also researched speeches given by Quakers and saw a drastic contrast. As I had predicted, Quakers focus much more on the content of their speeches and do not attempts to rally their audience. They may issue a plea for support, but primarily they provide information in such a way that the audience makes many of the conclusions for themselves. Quaker speeches are not at all "in your face" or aggressive. I plan to put a lot of effort into the constructions of my speech so that the content is appealing, but I will also try to be entertaining and animated, since the majority of my audience will be high schoolers. I have considered making a PowerPoint of pictures to keep my audience entertained and possibly passing out a general outline of the speech for them to follow along with.

Speech

I have completed my speech; yeah! Ironically as I read The Concept of Audience I found a lot of point which apply to my speech. It was interesting that the author so frequently compared the difficulties of writing to giving a speech to a live audience. I frequently feel that my writing is to directly addressed to a particular person. When I write, I write like I speak, so I envision a particular audience in my head as I write. I anticipate their reactions and develop counter arguments to them. However, the main flaw in my process, is that by having a particular audience in mind I only address their point of view and fail to think of others.
"You already know how to argue..... Life has taught you the elementary course." I found this introduction to be particularly interesting because my enter portfolio revolves around avoiding argument and finding alternative forms of discourse in which to convey one's point. It is interesting to try to write a persuasive paper about avoiding arguments without writing an argumentative essay. It would be pointless to write and argument about why arguing is wrong, therefore I believe one of the most difficult tasks I had writing my papers was tone. if the tone was argumentative, the entire essay would appear hypocritical.

Decision

I have finally decided. The medium I will implement will be a verbally delivered speech. The audience I will be addressing will be the national crowd of Quaker students and teachers which is drawn by the Quaker Youth Leadership Conference. And my topic will be the unification of Peace Educators under Quaker supervision and expansion of the implications and usage of Peace Education.

Initiating Action

Both of my previous papers have been calling for change within my community. For this assignment, however, I am focusing primarily on bringing about change, rather than explaining why the change needs to occur. I plan to appeal to Quakers to become more involved in Peace Education again and warn them against letting the movement be taken over and manipulated by private groups. The reason Peace Education is experiencing some current success is it is gaining recognition, however if private groups ruin the programs reputation by failing to teach properly there will be no future hope for the concept. I am considering two primary media genres, either a newspaper article, or a speech. I am leaning towards writing a speech to deliver at a large national Quaker Conference. My plan I to make an outline of what I want to say and then determine which genre will allow me to best express my points.

Essay Comments

I found the comments about my essay interesting, but they were not at all what I had expected. The one part that I did see coming was your concern that there were three parts to my essay, which I recognized and was worried might cause disjointedness. However, instead of trying to blend the sections together, you recommended reworking the first one so that it was of equal length. I suppose that it would make more sense to have three equal sections if I am going to maintain the separations. I personally would like to make more logical transitions to try to bring the reader along without confusing them each time I change topics. One of the risks I took in the paper was to come across rather forcefully which my question and answer segments, however you felt that this didn't give the reader enough time to process what I had said so I will need to rework these parts. Overall I'm still partial to the old system of inserting corrections directly into the text, but I did find the comments helpful.

I had an interesting weekend. I was prepared to take the bus back from JMU at 7:30p.m. but the bus ran into heavy traffic and was 2 hours late therefore I didn't leave until 9:30. This was manageable, however, only an hour into our trip the bus broke down and we were stranded on the side of 81. A long story short I got in after 1a.m. I am now considering writing an initiation action pamphlet to improve the Home Ride system.
Once I got back I looked over my articles regarding initiating action and decided that the ones I found most effective were the onces where main point was summarised in a picture. My articles are mostly about thinking and philosophical contemplation of the human species. My results were very different from many of my class members who seemed to have a large focus on environmental issues.

Peer review

My major fear regarding my essay was losing the reader’s attentions, but according to my editor that was not a problem. She did, however, find some area’s which confused her that had not occurred to me, since I had been working on it for so long. I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to restructure the problem areas of the paper. I felt that the work I put in resulted in an essay which flowed much smoother and had a more logical progression to its conclusion.
In general, it was helpful to have an outsider’s perspective. So much so that I after I made the corrections mentioned by my peer editor, I took my paper to another friend for additional input. I had her read the essay and give me feedback, just as my original editor had, and since she didn’t mention any of the concerns of my peer I asked her directly about those sections. She felt they were very clear and didn’t cause any confusion. I assume this to mean that I did a good job correcting my paper and the issues are no longer present. I suppose the real test comes when I hand it in.

Writing my essay

At first I was wondering how I was going to be able to make my essay different from my research proposal while maintaining the same topic. However, this proved to be easy and they turned out very different. In fact some of the additional research I did for the essay has caused me to revisit my proposal and alter it a bit based on the new information. The first half of my essay is loosely modeled after the more narrative style essays we read, and the second half is mostly analytical for the purpose of providing information to support my original statements. I struggled to make the essay flow smoothly, since I had a rather drastic stylistic change. The method that I found to be most successful was to continually refer back to the main point of the introduction, hence reminding my readers of the thesis and maintaining their interest by leading them to the conclusion rather than presenting it to them.

Shitty First Drafts

I don't think the shitty first draft process will work for me. By nature I am not a very organized writer so for years I have been training myself to create detailed outlines before I start writing to keep me on track and ensure I prove a point through my writing. This time, without an outline to go off, I found myself lost and rambling. Some people said that they felt more productive because they didn't have the block of trying to make their sentences perfect the first time. I find that I don't encounter this block because when I write the outline I don't use complete sentences, but by the time I go to write a real draft all I have to do is formulate a good sentence that expresses the bulleted point in my outline. Granted their are points in my shitty first draft that I want to use, but I feel that I have to sift though piles of junk to find just a few good points, which need to be further uncovered from the confusing sentence in which they are embedded. In my next piece of writing I might incorporate the shitty first draft process into my outline by writing an introductory and concluding paragraph, but leaving the rest as bullets.

What will make my essay good?

I was reading Ben's blog and like him I have been suffering from a nasty cold. I seem to have been sick almost continuously since I came to this school - maybe its the water. Anyway, I think the cold finally took hold of me when I was writing my "shitty first draft" because it was defiantly shitty. I have decided to treat it as more of a free write than a draft. I don't want to scrap the thing entirely because the order of my ideas is somewhat logical so for organizational purposes it will be helpful. However, almost all of the sentences need to be reworked for grammatical and aesthetic purposes. Additionally, I started to repeat myself a lot in the third paragraph so I am planning to combine the few original ideas embedded in it with the second paragraph.
Essentially I am using my shitty draft as a very vague outline. I feel that because I was so sick and the idea of speeding though a draft of an essay was new to me the process was not very productive for me. I have already begun rewriting in an entirely new word document and simply using the old one to keep me on track. However, I am very happy with the thesis and conclusion that came out of my shitty first draft. Now that I have a clear starting and ending point I feel my essay will be more logical. I have also done some additional research for this essay, which has caused me to revisit my research proposal. I think the two relate to each other very well, now that I have rewritten them both. I have a lot of work to do, but I feel I have a plan to produce a good "dental" essay.

A Moment of Silence

Rustle rustle, brush, squeak, earch, creak, cough…sigh. These are the sounds of silence. A room full of people just sitting. If you were to enter an auditorium sized building to find members of all ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds, sitting in a circle together completely quiet, would it make you uncomfortable? Why? Because society has taught us that it is socially unacceptable to remain quiet when surrounded by your peers. You are considered an outcast, an undesirable entity, if you do not converse with those around you; weather they are your closest friends, neighbors, family, or complete strangers, you must put yourself and your opinions out there for them to judge with little to no forethought. If society puts so much value on what individuals say, why don’t we give them more time to formulate their thoughts before we judge them? Would this not give us a truer estimate of their values and opinions?

Essays?

I was pleasantly surprised when I began reading the essays to find that they were more personal and less analytical in nature than I had expected. As I'm sure is the case with most of us in this class, I had a lot of experience reading and critiquing examples of many types of essays, both scholarly and non through previous English classes. I found these essays generally longer in length than what I had become accustomed to and hence, they seemed to smear across the boarder of essay and short story. "The Stunt Pilot" appeared to merge components of both genres of writing the most to me because of the clear story plot. However, there was also a clear point to the essay; to cause people to appreciate the art form of piloting through demonstrating it verbally. As a result of the attempted demonstration the essay was very descriptive, hence building anticipation to the take off and producing a very emotionally stimulating piece of work. In contrast I found myself struggling to grasp the point of "Ali in Havana". The essay was very descriptive in nature, but rather than describing an event, as was done in "The Stunt Pilot", people, their personalities, quirks, and physical attributes, were the primary focus of descriptive details. This style of writing remanded me of "Connie and the Sandman Ladies". I haven't been able to determine how similar my essay will be in nature to these examples because of the elemental difference in topics, but they have at least gotten me thinking in essay mode.

Meeting

I found the conference most helpful with regards to my procedure section. I had been struggling to find a way to clearly express mathematical calculations in words so you suggested inserting a table and some sample calculation. None of the research proposals I had looked at had contained sample data so the idea had not occurred to me, but I believe that the addition helps to clarify that section of the paper and add validity to the proposal as a whole.

Rsearch Proposal

I feel much better about my research proposal than I did at the beginning of the week. I found the conference incredibly helpful and reassuring. My main concern had been that I was not formatting the proposal properly and/or completely fulfilling the requirements of the assignment. I am anxious to get more feedback once you have read it through thoroughly. Looking ahead to the next assignment am contemplating altering my topic again slightly, not sure if this is an option. I'm going to evaluate the essays we go over in class to hopefully get a better idea of what I am striving for and then reassess weather I want t alter the focus within my community.

Overview of Week 7

I found myself feeling a little lost this week. I wanted clear guidelines regarding expectations of the research proposal last weekend, but felt like I didn't have them until after the "brainstorm" in class at which point my paper was already written. Hence, I felt like I was blindly writing with no regard for what the class requirements were since I was not aware of them. Luckily, the paper I had written was applicable and I feel that it should meet the class expectations. Hopefully, I can get all of my questions answered during our 15 minute conference. The reading from rewriting made me feel more confidant about my paper as a piece of writing, but not necessarily as an assignment for the class.