Process and Progress with Academic Writing
Over the past ten weeks, we have been challenged to not only improve the way we write, but we were asked to carefully evaluate the process before, during, and after we put our writing onto a page in order to enhance our writing abilities. We completed multiple drafts, peer reviews, revisions, and meticulous analyses of different journals, articles, publications and other pieces of work. Here, I will be taking you through my growth across these different areas by providing real work examples.
1. The very first time we did a "Read and Annotate" assignment, I thought it was complete waste of time, and I couldn't understand why we were doing that or how it applied to my own writing. After completing a couple of these assignments, I finally realized that what I was doing was not a waste of time but was instead teaching me how to properly analyze different types of writing. It broke writing down into several categories which made the what I was reading much easier to understand. This was especially helpful when we plugged our own articles into it. By breaking different journals and articles down, it allowed for me to find more reliable sources as well as having a full understanding for who the authors were and why they studied what they did.
2. One source that we used to find information that I was not expecting to be as useful as it was, was our twitter accounts. I have never had a Twitter and was timid to try and use it. I was uncomfortable and didn't see the point in using a social media app for academics, but it actually ended up leading me to find some really useful information and articles that I was able to use in many of my drafts.
3. The final building block that I found really helpful was blogging. I didn't think anything of it at first, but it not only allowed me to get to know information better because I had to share it, but it was also nice getting to put my own thoughts and opinions in there. I also thought some of the comments left were very thoughtful and I was able to find some useful information out from reading some of my classmate's blogs.
While sometimes peer review can push me outside my comfort zone, it was a very helpful tool in this case because it helped me figure out what parts of my writing were confusing or unclear while also allowing me to change different aspects to help readers gain a better understanding for what I was trying to say. This part of the writing process is vital to the writing process because it allows us to hear feedback on our work without fully showcasing our work. It is an extremely beneficial process because it helps us better define our work. Talking about my writing with others not only created a sense of community in that we are all trying to write as best we can, but it also allows us to talk about different parts we struggle with or have an easier time with and help one another through those processes. I think I could've done a better job getting my stuff in on time to make partnering easy, but I did get some really good feedback from the professor, classmates, and peers. I felt like I got more out of getting advice because I felt completely lost in this class all quarter and my peers an classmates really helped me along. I think that getting multiple peers to go over your work is much more helpful, and that is something I look forward to doing to improve my writing going forward. I think this helped me develop as a writer and as a reviewer because now I know it is okay to be super picky when completing a peer review, and I should be open to critical feedback.
1. The first peer review that was extremely helpful to me was the comments left on my blog posts because it was a nice way to ease into giving and receiving feedback before we dove into more formal peer reviews.
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2. A peer review that I did was on one of my classmates blog posts, and I thought that I may have helped them with the formatting for their citations because they had the basis of the citation it was just in APA instead of MLA.
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3. One of the peer reviews that I got was not the most helpful because I needed to be helped along instead of just pointing out what was wrong with it. I didn't know what to do in order to fix it, but I am glad that they pointed out that I was doing it wrong.
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4. The last peer review that aided my writing along was having one of my roommates go over my writing, and they were able to catch some of my punctuation and grammar errors as well as helping me simplify my introduction and conclusion because it was super wordy and repetitive.
Three Building Blocks
Peer Review
Revision and Review Process
1. The first revision that I thought helped better help establish my argument was creating a better introduction for the articles and journals I used in order to prove what I was saying about dog behavior. I started by taking my annotated bibliography and changing some areas as a way to introduce the sources, and then I decided that it needed more. I didn't just want to shoot information at the reader I wanted them to have a feel for what the writers process was to get to conducting a study like that.
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2. The second revision that I thought enhanced my work was include more statistics. I thought that the sources I had were very useful, but I needed to include more statistics in order to fully support what was being argued or studied.
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3. The last revision that I did was taking one of the sources I found and instead of using the article, I decided to use the study that they cited and used in the article. It made my writing much more scholarly and also added an additional source. It made the explanation of the article much clearer and allowed what I was trying to say to be even further supported.
