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.