Learning Outcome #1: Recursive Process (Revision)
I have chosen the second assigned essay as my significant writing project. The main reason that I have chosen this essay is because it was the large writing assignment that I made the most revisions on because I really wanted it to make sense. In the first paper, I did not revise more than a paragraph, which was a huge mistake because I got a solid C on the assignment. This paper made me change my mind on revisions. I now understood that revisions are a key part of the writing process and going without them causes a lot of confusion, incoherent, wordy text with little-to-no meaning behind it. What I did differently in my second paper with all of the revisions was that I focused on the paper’s flow. This includes strengthening my analyses, claims, and thesis in hopes of having a nice flow to the paper and of course to avoid any confusion. The last thing was that during the revising process, I would read my paper, find something that did not make much sense, change it, then read my thesis over again to see if it had actually made sense. This long process helped me center myself back into what I was actually arguing and it made my paper stronger overall.
Learning Outcome #2: Integrating Ideas
For this paper, I made a decent amount of strong connections from one text to another and from my life to the texts. In my essay, I spoke about the lack of empathy in regards to social media, the younger generation, and the future of human interaction. My connection was that social media is creating a barrier when it comes to human emotions and people feeling things for one another. With social media, children in middle school and even prior are making superficial connections, that is, not making emotional connections to other children and being okay with it because they do not know any different. This is the same for older generations as well, creating this brick wall that emotions can’t get through, causing a lack of emotional, empathetic connection. I talked about these ideas through many examples, but I basically told the stories of the certain situations in the movie or the texts that I thought were worth speaking about. I made the mistake in a couple of places in this paper of just telling the story of whichever text I was touching on, specifically the story of the Westboro Baptist Church. In this, I simply just told the story of Megan Phelps-Roper, who was a main member of the church without any analysis or argument attached to it. In other places I spoke about the difference between a conversation face-to-face versus a conversation over text or the phone for example. The quote I used in this analysis was in regards to children and how they are making relationships in the unhealthy way of online instead of in person. My thesis is: “Social media is ruining our ability as a society to effectively communicate, empathize, and learn from one another.” I used “Empathy Diaries” by Sherry Turkle, “The Social Dilemma” produced by Jeff Orlowski, and “Unfollow” by Adrien Chen. With these texts, I conducted the analysis of my thesis, bringing in important parts of each text to support my argument. This essay still has some errors, as every essay does, but I believe it is the best one I have written in this class and I think that it is a fine example of my ability to draw connections between ideas and texts. I saw the connections in my head almost immediately after reading and watching the sources that I used. I then organized my thoughts onto the document I typed my essay on and revised it from there. I use this strategy every time now when I write papers.
Learning Outcome #5 & #6: Citations and Local Revisions
I learned how to cite my sources as in-text citations properly from Professor Erwin in class. It came very easy because it’s pretty much common sense on the best way to cite something in a paper. However, for the movie’s citation, I had to google how to do it correctly, for I missed class where it was explained. On another note, I generally fix all of my grammatical errors as I make them, so there was little to fix in that area for the final draft. Of course I still l went over the paper to check for anything I had missed. Basically any grammatical errors I made had been fixed before revisions even started.
