Learning Outcome #1
In my first project, I found that I did not really edit my paper as much globally as I did locally. I think this is because I was still learning the process, and also learning how to edit my paper not only for grammar, spelling, and sentence structure, but also editing and revising my ideas too. By the time my third project rolled around this process became easier for me. When looking at my first draft of Project 3, My ideas were underdeveloped and my quotes needed a better analysis. My peers also helped me focus in on specific arguments to make my paper flow and also help stay on track. For example, In my third draft of Project 3 (draft due before we did peer review), I used a block quote from Hal Herzog’s article, The quote was as follows;
“Like most people, I am conflicted about our ethical obligations to animals. The philosopher Strachan Donnelley calls this murky ethical territory “the troubled middle.” Those of us in the troubled middle live in a complex moral universe. I eat meat—but not as much as I used to, and not veal. I oppose testing the toxicity of oven cleaner and eye shadow on animals, but I would sacrifice a lot of mice to find a cure for cancer. And while I find some of the logic of animal liberation philosophers convincing, I also believe that our vastly greater capacity for symbolic language, culture, and ethical judgment puts humans on a different moral plane from that of other animals” (Herzog 7).
This quote is a big quote, and I was using it to help support one of my sub arguments that lobsters actually maybe do feel pain. In my essay, I really did not explain this quote very well or use more textual evidence to support my arguments. This is the quote that I felt needed the most analysis in my essay, since this quote raises some tensions and also has multiple different ideas in it. This problem occurred throughout my paper, and I felt that after talking to my peers that this was the biggest area I needed to work on in my paper. By the finish product, I felt that my analysis on each quote was more solid than they were at the beginning of the drafting process.
Learning Outcome #2
In Project 3, the selection of proper evidence and quotations was crucial in my writing process. There were three articles that I chose to take quotations from, and I took one to two quotes from each article that I thought best fit the argument that I was trying to make. For example, I picked the following quote from Hal Herzog’s piece called Animals Like Us;
“Those of us in the troubled middle live in a complex moral universe. I eat meat—but not as much as I used to, and not veal. I oppose testing the toxicity of oven cleaner and eye shadow on animals, but I would sacrifice a lot of mice to find a cure for cancer” (Herzog 7).
I chose this quote because I feel that I also seem to fit into this idea of the troubled middle. First, I started out my giving a little bit of insight about the overall themes that Herzog discussed in his piece. Then, I introduced the quote by introducing the troubled middle, and explaining what I thought it means to be apart of the troubled middle. After putting the quote into my writing, I then analyzed the quote. I included some personal meaning to why I believe I stand in the troubled middle, and also why people might say that it is morally wrong to be treating animals poorly. In addition, I also added in counter arguments to my analysis that people may have towards the actions explained in the quotation from Animals Like Us. I think including counter arguments is really important in order for your audience to be able to make conversation with your piece, and I think this concept was an important one to grasp in order for my writing down the line to be better.
Learning Outcome #3
The third learning outcome is to employ techniques for active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking. I think over the course of this class, I have shown that I understand this learning outcome pretty well. When looking back at the article Against Meat by Jonathan Safran Foer, I can see that my marginal comments reflect the ideas in the first paragraph of Susan Gilroy’s brief selection about active and critical reading skills. Gilroy first addresses that a reader should mark up the margin with words and phrases about things in the piece that interests you, seems important to you, and connections to course themes. Throughout Against Meat, I wrote things that were conversational in the margins, as well as one to two word comments about how I felt about certain things brought up in this article. I find it easiest for me to break up my annotating so I can clearly see the bigger themes in the article versus the additional ideas supporting the main themes. Additionally, I had many questions written about views posed in the article. Lastly, I chose to highlight significant sections that I thought really tied into class themes. I think this whole process is so important when it comes to understanding an article. Now that I have progressed through this entire semester, I think annotating has really helped me understand articles than can be somewhat challenging to grasp the concepts of. In the second paragraph of Gilroy’s brief piece, she highlighted the importance of analyzing the sources to plainly see the thesis, main arguments, and supporting points of a piece. I think that this part of the analysis was easiest to do in the informal reading responses, and also during class discussion. I really enjoy class discussion because I can hear what my peers take on the piece is and develop new ideas based on conversation. Lastly, Gilroy talks about the importance of connecting readings to other readings. The informal reading responses are helpful to gather my thoughts about the interesting pieces in the articles that I read, and also a place to connect these readings to other pieces.
Learning Outcome #4
Peer review is something that I have learned so much about over the course of this semester. When it comes to my knowledge about peer review at the beginning of the semester I thought it was just reading over someone else’s paper, and just catching all their little mistakes here and there. In high school, we would pass around each others papers and silently edit essays for a whole class period. The comments I received in this type of peer review were really unhelpful because they did not relate to the actual content that we were writing about. Later on, I learned that this was something called ‘local’ revision. However, it started to come apparent to me that this is a very surface level part of the revision process. I soon learned the importance of doing global revision as well as some local revision. It should be expected that we proofread our own essays for local errors such as spelling, grammar, and sentence structure before turning them in. The biggest thing for me to get used to was the idea of giving our critiques to each other face t face. I have always been self conscious of other people reading my writing, but this class helped me get out of my shell. By the end of the semester I was looking forward to peer review because I knew that I could turn to them for help with my writing. As a group we talked about potential quotes to add in, sources to use, reworking paragraphs to make the essay flow better, adding in a counterargument or opposing view, and letting each other know what needs more clarification and/or synthesis. As opposed to my editing at the start of the semester, which consisted of mostly local revision and some global editing. It was helpful to work with my peers to correct global errors early in the writing process so that I had a more focused paper, rather than writing the entire paper and having a lot of things to fix. The whole concept of this global and local revision was all new to me, and by the end of this semester I feel that peer review has helped me tremendously with my writing.
Learning Outcome #5 and #6
My experience using MLA format was not really that developed until I got to college, because my teachers in high school were generally laid back about in text citations and the format. However, it is a lot different here as you must cite all sources used in any paper. The first thing I had to get used to was the heading and the page numbers at the top of each page. I never had to use these headings in high school, and even though teachers wanted us to use MLA format in our citations, we never had to format our entire papers in MLA. In ENG 110, I used MLA throughout the whole paper and I think I have the format down well. I had to format block quotes a certain way, and I had to indent them half an inch which I never had to do before. I used both in text citations and had a ‘Works Cited’ page on every paper. In addition, I also had to cite myself in some of my papers and also my peers when referencing their essays in previous assignments, which was all completely new to me. Secondly, I also learned what local revisions were. A local revision could be spelling errors, grammar errors, sentence structure errors, or punctuation errors. I think everyone makes these silly mistakes in their writing, but I think I do a good job at keeping these errors to a minimum. I do this by constantly reviewing my work for these errors, and even in peer review my peers will do a quick scan of my paper for local errors too.
