Learning Outcome #1: Recursive process
The first draft and the final draft I chose is from the first essay of the year because I feel like I improved my paper the most from it. after writing my first college paper, I saw that I had much to improve on with my writing. I started out frustrated on what I could fix, but after reading through my essay a lot, I was able to find what I could improve on. Many of my sentences could have a lot more information in them instead of just a short sentence that isn’t needed. The peer reviews help show me where I went wrong because an extra set of eyes helps you gain perspective on your paper. My introduction paragraphs and my concluding paragraph need a lot of work. It is always difficult for me to start out a paragraph and be able to say what I want to say without confusion. Forming a thesis statement is still difficult for me to make because I have a hard time choosing what I want to talk about until the end of my essay. I also realized that my paragraph are not chronological. By this I mean that my sentences are not followed by a paragraph that helps my argument.
Learning Outcome #2: Integrated Ideas.
Throughout my essay, I was able to make strong connections from Malcom Gladwell “Making Conversation,” to today’s problems through activism. He said that true activism cannot happen because of the use of technology and people coming together on the internet instead of in person. The #MeToo movement that we just read proves this wrong. Being able to take examples from the essay and comparing it to my life is not very difficult for me because I am able to compare mostly everything that happened during the sit-ins to todays world such as, the way that the whole black community stuck up for one another is what is happening right not. All the woman in the world are sticking up for themselves and sharing their stories about their past relationships and received a lot of hate for it. They know that what they are doing is right and won’t let anyone tell them differently.
My thesis statement in this essay is “Both Kwame Anthony Appiah and Malcolm Gladwell explain that social change is difficult to do because there are so many different ways people are connected.” At the time while reading a handout teaching us how to right a thesis, I thought this was good. Throughout the semester I learned that this statement did not tell the reader which side I was choosing. Throughout the other papers, I was able to make known which side I was choosing and why. This essay shows that I am able to make deep connections to other works by choosing the bigger picture in the essays we read. Being able to look outside the box of what the writer is telling us is an important way to realize that these problems have never gone away, they are just disguised as something else. With Appiah’s definition of cosmopolitanism, we can see that it has brought the world together for the most part. But people are still less compelled to accept the people in their everyday life as part of their culture. Seeing a person walk down the street who doesn’t look anything like you and doesn’t act like you, you think that this person is destroying our countries culture but it isn’t, it is enhancing it and making it more diverse and accepting to all people.
Learning Outcome #5 & #6: Citations and Local Revision
I first learned how to cite my work in MLA format freshman year of high school, but I slowly forgot how to do it correctly. While in college, having to write many paper for classes, I had to relearn how to cite correctly. This bettered my paper because I was able to add interesting quotes that made sense to what I was talking about. My use of grammar is sub par because I’ve never been an avid reader. I usually do run-on sentences or fragment sentences, but when I read it over I find my mistake and fix it. Also my sentences tend to be mixed up and don’t make complete sense. Through peer review, I was able to look at what mistakes I made and fix them.
