Kayla Millman's Writing Project Analysis

In reviewing the essay, there are many errors I noticed. Overall, your writing lacks focus in regards to ideas, grammar, and spelling. I am no expert in any of these areas, but my ability to produce a coherent essay is demonstrated by the fact that I am nearly done with college. The goal of my essay is to guide you towards a better way of writing based on my prior experiences. A good essay in my experience is one that has three major components: structure, depth, and voice.

Overall, the essay seemed to lack flow as a result of a noticeable absence of transition words. The essay had bad syntax. Each paragraph seemed to be scenario after scenario and each sentence seemed to be idea after idea. For example, in the first paragraph, the list consisted of multiple sentences, instead of just one sentence with commas. “But they are few: Being mistaken for a wheat field by a cloud of locusts. Being buried alive”...“Interviews from film festivals.”, this seemed like an awful way to list ideas. In addition, the fourth paragraph of the essay was made up of only 2 sentences, one

Within the past eight weeks, I have realized my strengths and weaknesses within the writing process. I have realized that I do not utilize the first step within the writing process of prewriting. However, for the drafting, revising, and polishing steps of the writing process, I am very familiar and use additional resources to strengthen the writing assignment. I create multiple drafts, which includes revising and polishing in each step. Therefore, I use all three of these steps in multiple drafts as I reach the final product for

The initial critiques I received from the professor where somewhat expected. In my drafts I try to just write down everything

I have used the “D” variation of looking at individuals Student Writing from Katherine Bomer’s Hidden Gems to analyze and evaluate Melody’s writing. My first reactions to Melody’s writing are that her structure and conventions are strong and detailed and organized. Bomer and the list of “qualitative features of writing checklist” located in Hidden Gems, helped me analyze Melody’s work in a positive aspect located things such as the student “communicates thoughts and ideas, the story has a logical organizational structure of sequence, the story has an effective strategies for organizing information and the story has a sentence – to – sentence and word – to – word relationship” (Bomer, 2010, p. 83). All of these ideas that Bomer has listed

In the project 1, my use of rhetoric was above average in my opinion. My essay responded to the question of what good writing is. I used clear sentences and many examples to make my point. To explain the idea that good writing has no rules, I used the unstructured format of Whitehead’s text. I wrote that Whitehead did not follow common and basic rules for writing such as having an introductory and concluding paragraphs; however, his writing can be considerate as good because he accomplished his initial goal of convincing the readers that writing is rule free.

In a series of letters written to and from the sisters, Angelina and Sarah’s writing showcased how their activism was both highly radical and unrealistic for the time period. To showcase this, Angelina delivered a speech targeted at southern women on why they should help free the slaves. The women down in the south reading Angelina’s words would most likely shock them since helping with abolitionism technically goes against the law. This mentality seems to be extremely radical, since both of the sisters are considering the law to be less objective than religion. “I know the doctrine of obeying God, will be considered as dangerous and heretical by many, but I am not afraid openly to avow it, because it is the doctrine of the Bible. . . . If a law commands me to sin, I will break it. . .” She clearly shows that she has no qualms of risking going to prison in order to get what she wants. On the opposing viewpoint, some would consider Angelina to be remaining in her domestic role since she spoke out against slavery for religious reasons. Even so, she would not defy the law if she was trying to be traditional. This would only be unrevolutionary if freeing slaves would have complied with the law.

The writing of my college essay was quite a process. Normally for me writing comes rather easy, I do not struggle putting my ideas on paper. At first I thought that this essay would be simple to do and not be very stressful. It turned out to be quite the opposite in fact, just brainstorming was a struggle for me. It was difficult for me to think about my life and how it is special. To me, the events that have shaped me do not seem that relevant, at 18 I had never really payed much attention to how certain things affected me, I just lived my life. eventually , with the help of Mary, I came to the realization that having my summer taken away from me due to a broken foot had really changed my life philosophy, it truly changed who I was and my outlook on life.

Some of these errors included repetitive transitions, sentence fragments and general grammar and punctuation errors. After these errors were fixed, I thoroughly read through both of the essays in order to develop a full understanding of what else I need to improve. Following these readings, I fixed any further grammatical errors I may have missed the first time when I revised these essays earlier in the semester. Following this revision, I expanded on a few paragraphs where I felt as though my ideas were not explained well-enough. I expanded a fair amount on my paragraphs in Project #3 as I believe that I had left some ideas unexplained. One of these ideas include how children are the ones who will one day help to shape the future. I also improved on some further transitions that I found could use some refinement. After improving on these transitions, I simplified any overly-complex sentences I may have had in my essays. Throughout the semester, I have had a problem with writing overly-complex sentences. The process of revision has helped in clarifying this aspect of writing for me as well as aspects relating to transitions and sentence fragments. Through the clarification of these aspects, I believe I have grown as a

Project 1 and 2 assisted me with intermeshing writing as a process that included planning, revision, and editing based on feedback from instructors and peers, which is the first goal. Although I perceived Project 1 as a success, my peers revealed otherwise. During peer review, Daniel thumbed through my essay and recommended that I provide details for my history with writing and to fuse examples with my claims. Ryan

During this semester in English 107, I have progressed more as a writer. Before I went to University of Arizona, my writing was rigid. I wrote five-paragraph TOEFL style essay all the time in my high school life. After I attended in English 107, I was not confident about my writing skill. Throughout these three projects we have done, I become more and more confident about my writing skill than before. The Student Learning Outcomes also helped me to grow as a writer a lot. In these goals, I did well on several of them, but I still need to work on the other goals.

I grew up in a extremely small town outside of Birmingham, and the high school I went to is not known for its academia. If I recall right, my high school english classes assigned only 1-2 papers a year, so writing 4-5 in a semester was a completely new adventure for me. I learned many things in this course that greatly helped me improve my writing. My writing overall improved in style, flow, and basic fundamental writing thought processes, which is all the areas that are hard to learn. I started to see my style and flow had grown bland and very fact based instead of grabbing the attention of the readers. Now that I understand where my writing needs improvement, I can start focusing on those areas and fixing my papers.

The process I used when writing previously changed during the first few weeks of this class. Already I have altered the way I write my drafts, and the way I read other people’s work. Lamott’s “Shitty First Draft” made me come to the realization that one draft isn’t always the best approach. Therefore, I took multiple steps in examining my draft and critiquing it accordingly. Additionally, I started brainstorming topics, and this led me to create a roadmap for the list of destinations and topics I wanted to touch on and the message I wanted the reader to take away. This is just the beginning of the year and I already have a sense that as I progress through the semester my work will be continually get better.

Being a perpetually anxious person, I tend to be particular in my daily life. I need to clean my room and make my bed before I leave. I must sleep at 9:00pm every night. I have to wake up at 6:00am every morning. I need to do a certain thing at a specific time, or it throws me off. Writing allows me to be messy. It allows me to vomit words and struggle to write a coherent sentence before finally, my thoughts are realized onto the paper. My process is wonderfully disorganized. It is starting to write, eventually erasing everything I've written, starting all over again, realizing that I was straying from my point, and retyping it a second time. My process is becoming frustrated at the pretentious introduction. It's wanting to smash my computer

I believe it is important for any student who wants to do their best in a class to take a moment to evaluate their own work to determine the rate their writing is progressing and how they can continue to advance their writing. When I looked through my own work I asked myself “what have I learned this semester?” and “what do I still need to learn in order to improve my writing?”. Answering both these questions will help me with my last step of my self-evaluation, developing a plan to learn new skills.