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.