Planning for Revisions

I chose to revise my argument analysis paper since it was my worst paper. I did not fully understand how to write an argument analysis, so I definitely wanted to retry and get it right.

To effectively rewrite the paper, I chose to only use the old paper as an outline of ideas for me to write on for my new paper. I chose to start fresh with my new argument analysis instead of correcting my grammar and structure from the failed paper. This turned out to be a much better paper, with better transitions and greater overview of the argument. 

Final Reflection

For my first blog post, I talked about how this class was a requirement for me to take, but I also stated that with it being a requirement I also wanted to become a better writer. I wanted to become a better writer because in most of my classes it was a requirement to write a lot of papers and essays, and I believe that this class has thought me to become a better writer.

I know that I still have a lot of weaknesses with my writing; one is that I tend to over write certain parts of the paper, or sometimes I don’t write enough.

But I have improved in my transitions from one idea to another and how my paper flows when read. 

My Favorite Paper

The paper I enjoyed writing the most, which in turn is my favorite, is my literacy narrative paper. Writing the paper really brought me back to my childhood and memories of absolutely hating anything that relates to writing or reading. This was my favorite because I was able to write it in 1^st person perspective and I enjoy writing that way since it seems a lot more natural to me. This was also the easiest for me to write since I didn’t have to do any research on a topic or have to follow too many guidelines; it was just a paper where I could write my thoughts and experiences on paper without being too restricted in the manner in which I wrote it in.

I am mainly thinking about using this paper for my portfolio because it is one of the only papers I enjoyed writing this year. It wasn’t too restricted as stated above, and it was enjoyable because I got to think back to those old memories where I was too stubborn to do anything that related with school and writing. 

Analyzing

When I analyzed my peer’s essay, I got a lot of great ideas to put into my own paper. I started to put more specific information towards my essay and not be so choppy with my sentence transitions. His essay flowed freely without having to have that awkward transition between sentences, I then used this information that I had read and applied it to my own essay. I believe that this greatly strengthened my paper and I was very glad that I got to analyze his essay.

Another thing I learned from analyzing another peer’s paper is that having filler words don’t really look that great. It makes the paper seem redundant and repetitive and overall doesn’t make for a good college level paper.

The last thing I learned is how to identify my topic. I knew what my topic was, but it didn’t really stand out to a reader that didn’t know what I was doing with the paper and exactly what I wanted to portray in the paper. 

Peer Review

As a peer reviewer I feel like I don’t qualify enough to judge someone’s paper, I’m not the best writer in the world nor do I even think of myself as a good one either. This is why I have a hard time to peer reviewing someone’s paper; I still try my best to help them out though. Most of the time I just fix certain words in the essay that doesn’t flow well with the rest of the sentences, I fix spelling errors, and punctuation errors.

As the person who get peer reviewed, I like the criticism I get and the corrections I get from my peers. In the beginning I felt that the person who was peer reviewing my paper had no grounds to say anything bad about my paper, that he did not have the authority to say anything bad about another person’s paper, but I eventually opened up to the idea of active criticism and I now enjoy it and actually love the idea of it. 

Writing Errors

One of my prominent writing errors is my transition from one topic to another. They are extremely abrupt and don’t build up to the transition. This makes my essays seem very unorganized and abrupt. Another error I make is using word fillers; I use a lot of words that could be summed up in one or two words. I do this because I try to fulfill the page requirements for my essays. 

Argument Analysis

When I first saw the list of articles I was to choose from for my argument analysis paper I thought, “man this is probably going be a list of boring ass articles that i’m gonna have to sit through and read three times in a row just to understand what the heck they are talking about.”  But one title caught my attention right away, The $78 Million Dollar Bag by Mick Dumke and Ben Joravsky, so much that I didn’t even bother reading the other articles, I clicked the link and closed the list off my computer.

Even though I didn’t know what the article was going to talk about, the title really caught my attention. At first I thought it probably had something to do with how banks are run or what kind of investments people get into to make money, but it was the farthest away from those two, it’s about Marijuana.  The article talks about how much government spending goes into enforcing anti-drug laws and if it’s even worth enforcing with the amount of money we are dumping to the cause. It states that Chicago alone has made 23,000 annual arrests just for marijuana possession and that opening a case would cost $2,500 to the tax payers. These numbers where incredibly shocking numbers to me as I never knew the amount of people that get caught with drug possession let alone how much it costs just to open a case against them. The article even states the amount of money that policemen make just for being witnesses at a case and that even though there is an amount of people that pay the posting bond, a greater amount doesn’t and that is costing tax payers even more money. These are very shocking information to people that are not involved with these acts or don’t have any knowledge of our justice system and the costs it has to us tax payers. These costs are getting so out of hand that officials themselves are advising McCarthy to stop arresting people for small possession of drugs as it is wasting time and money for the city.

Less enforcement for greater savings? I guess so.

Beginning to Present Writing

I think my writing skills have definitely improved from the beginning of the semester to the present. I have learned how to write better due to the peer reviews that we do in class, and I have had many practices with the weekly blog posts.

As I stated before, the peer reviews and the weekly blog posts have helped me get a lot of needed practice with writing. Most of the time prior to this class, the only writing I got to do was for papers for classes and short essays that I had to write during class. This wasn’t a weekly occurrence so I did not get many chances to improve upon my writing. With the peer reviews I was able to see my mistakes be pointed out by my own peers and I had a chance to correct those mistakes. I was able to see what they thought was wrong with my paper and what I should have done instead. The weekly blog posts helped me practice and didn’t put as much pressure on me as if it was a paper for class. It let me be a little more lenient with my writing and explore a bit; which in turn helped me become a better writer. 

Struggling Ash

Purpose:  The purpose of his advertisement is to remind people what smoking does and how it affects us in the long run. This advertisement does not have any words or form of literacy that we can use to describe its meaning, but it does have an image. An image which is worth a thousand words. They have kept the image of this advertisement fairly simple; it portrays a burning cigarette with a dying silhouette of a man made out of ash.  In my opinion this is a very great way to show the effects of cigarette smoking in the long run.


Audience: This advertisement is targeting smokers more directly, but is also targeting non-smokers. This advertisement shows the reality of long-term smoking while warning would-be smokers of its effects and what could happen to them if they start smoking. One of the indicators of this is the fact that the picture does not have any positive aspects to it. It does not have anyone smiling or having fun, but instead it shows a silhouette of a dying man made out of ash seemingly trying to get back up from his struggles and almost giving up all hope.


Genre: This is an Anti-Smoking ad which is trying to curb people away from smoking.


Tone: The tone of this advertisement is dramatic. It shows the man struggling to get back up from his knees while having his head down like as if he is giving up. The ash in this advertisement is conforming to the silhouette of the man and is slowly falling apart. It is not showing life anymore but an eventual death. The cigarette itself does not even have a living ember in it, like the fire has already died out and soon the man will follow. The whole scene is also very fragile looking, as if a soft breeze could blow this whole picture away and be eventually forgotten by the observer.

Rough Draft to Final Paper

If there is one aspect that is proportionally different from my rough draft to final paper is the length. I will admit that my rough draft was more or else “Half-Assed” I practically did it the same morning it was due. Nevertheless it helped me create a better final paper. It really showed the flaws that I would make for a paper that was done in 30 minute time; Grammatical errors where all over the place, spelling errors, repetitive information, and an abrupt ending.

I made big changes with my rough draft to my final paper. One was the length of the work; another is a more organized train of thoughts, more descriptive events, and an ending that would fit well with the rest of the paper. I made these changes so that I would not completely fail my final paper, if I had not, I’m afraid even my professor would laugh me out of class.

After revising my rough draft I was able to find a lot of errors such as spelling, grammatical errors, run-on sentences, and repetitive information that seemed to go nowhere. I reread my paper for most of my revisions, only looking back to the peer-review to get an outside perspective into the matter. I did not use the peer-review much mainly because it was a shitty paper and I knew it. The peer-review would only point out things that I would already know about the paper and get me nowhere in the end.

The strongest points on my final paper has to be the flashback events of me in grade school and how those events changed my feelings towards the book Holes and future assigned readings. The weakest is my ending as I was not too sure on how to end the paper. I felt that I could have ended it a lot better than it turned out to be. 

Is it an A paper or a C paper?

Introduction-

What sets an A paper to a C paper can start from, well, the introduction. When a reader reads a piece of literacy they need to become interested in it the moment they read the first few sentences. If a paper that a student passes to a professor or teacher has a below par introduction, this can cause the professor to automatically think badly of the paper and dismiss it as another “C” paper.  Of course a lot of other factors will determine a C paper over an A paper, but the introduction will be the first in my opinion.

Organization-

A paper that has information and topics all over the place can not only confuse the reader, but also make it seem like the writer is being repetitive.  This is crucial to a paper, the writer must figure out what information should be written down first and what other information will complement it nicely. This makes the flow of the paper that much smoother and easily readable.

Ending-

A paper might have an awesome introduction and a great organization of information and ideas, but if the ending leaves the reader guessing and frustrated on how it ended, whether abruptly or too long, this can cause the feelings of the reader to change from good to bad. Just like a movie you would see from the theatre, it may have some awesome action and story line, but if the ending sucked, most of the time we say the movie also sucked.

For me I have a very hard time making a great introduction for my papers. I just can’t seem to illustrate my full feelings of the topic and write it in a way that will grab my reader’s attention. What I believe I must do first is to read more material and try to get an idea from other people’s writings and illustrations.

The easiest for me to do is organizing my ideas. If I write my ideas into a piece of paper, I can usually string them together and get a smooth read for my readers. It’s not perfect but it is the best out of these three topics. 

Literacy Narrative

My first topic that I wanted to choose for my literacy narrative was the experience I had with the book Holes. I really enjoyed reading this book back in grade school, even though most of the subjects and books that we had to read back then were boring, this was the one book that stood above the rest. This was the one book that I actually read back in grade school, I know that's bad, but I was a kid! This book wasn't boring like the other books we had to read, and I really liked how the main character, Stanley, was able to get out of the financial situation that his family was in.

Another topic I was going to write about was my obsession with comic books and manga. I loved to watch anime and cartoons as a child, but growing up those things seem to fade away. But when I first saw that they had those cartoons and anime in comic form, I got very excited. I felt like a kid again, being able to relive the moments I had as a kid always wishing I could be one of those super heroes kicking butt and saving the day. Now that I am much older I don't fantasize about that notion as much, but I still do enjoy reading a comic here and there whenever I go inside a book store or when I am browsing the web.

I have not really thought of a third topic for my literacy narrative, but if I come across one, I will make sure to post another blog.

Writing 101-2

I am mainly taking this writing course because it is a required Gen Ed course. What I really want to get out of it is the skills to be able a better writer, and to not have as much grammatical errors as I usually do. I think NEIU requires students to take this course because they want to help these students become better writers individually and to also help them out with other classes since there are other classes besides the writing class that would require a student to write long essays and papers.