Plagiarism Checker: Assignment 1

The originality report I got back from SafeAssign for my first writing assignment showed I had a 0% match. This means that my paper has nothing that could possibly be plagiarized because it didn’t find anything matching online. I did not use any writing from online or another source in my writing that I didn’t cite so I believe this score to be accurate.  This shows me that I am doing a good job of writing my own ideas and when i’m using another’s ideas I am citing and quoting properly. If I just keep writing like I am than I will be fine in terms of plagiarism, though my overall writing could use some work.

I think that this plagiarism checker could be a good tool for teachers to use for essays. I don’t think it is unethical as long as teachers give students a chance to explain why their may have been a match on the checker even if they did not plagiarize. This is because some writing may have been coincidentally similar somewhere else. As long as students are given a chance to defend themselves I believe this plagiarism checker can be a helpful tool for teachers and for students as well.

 

Essay 1 Review

Looking back at my Rhetorical Analysis Essay and Mrs. Hays’ comments I can see things that I did well and also things I can improve on. First, looking at the Higher Order Concerns, I can see that I had a central thesis and I also based my evidence on that thesis to give support. One improvement I need to make is to address my specific audience which I did not do in this paper. My paper is pretty well organized with each paragraph focusing on a different portion of my thesis I was trying to prove. This helped make my paper easier to read and it helped me stay on topic also. I was a little inconsistent with my introducing of sources and alerting my reader with signal phrases. When I did do this, I was successful, but sometimes I just went right into a quote or paraphrase without any intro.

Now when I examine my paper for lower order concerns I find a few more problems. The biggest problem was that I was putting my punctuation after quotation marks when they should be inside of the quotes. This reoccurred many times throughout my paper but should be an easy fix. The only other area of improvement could be with some of my word choice. Sometimes I would use words that weren’t very clear or were unprofessional, like when I described my source as a story instead of an essay.

In order to get a better grade on this paper I would need to do a few things. Some of the easy mistakes to fix would be the lower order concerns where I could simply proofread my paper over and fix whatever isn’t correct. The more difficult fixes would be the higher order concerns. Maybe in my intro I can address my audience somewhere. I think the biggest fix for me would be to better introduce quotes, but especially introducing my paraphrases as well because I didn’t do that often. Other than these mistakes I think I did a very good job of having a specific thesis and sticking to that thesis throughout the whole essay. Also, I organized my paragraphs well in order to use my evidence in the most clear way possible to help support my thesis.

Refining My Topic

My research question is “How can food improve one’s athletic performance?”. I changed my topic slightly from before because my original question, “How does food effect athletic performance?” because this question seemed very broad and would be too difficult to answer the whole question. Another problem with too broad of a question is it may make my essay less interesting to read since I would be covering so much information. I believe that my new topic creates a more precise question and has more to do with what we should do to improve rather than also including what not to do, which would make my paper less concise.

This topic interests me because I am an athlete and I want to learn how I can be a better athlete. I know already a decent amount about the difference between healthy and unhealthy foods, but I wanted to dig deeper to see which healthy foods will actually benefit me the most. I am excited to research my topic because I can actually change my real life eating habits while researching my paper!

For my research I will use both primary and secondary sources. I already have found a primary source which was about pre-game meals for athletes which was written in the 1970s. I will also use some secondary sources found from the internet, from reputable sources of course, that are more current to get more information that I can add to my paper.

Gerard Interview and my new research topic

According to Gerard, I should choose a research topic based on a topic that I am interested so that I can learn more about it. One of my biggest interests is athletics/sports. I have been playing sports my whole life and love them, so why not pick a topic that has to do with sports? Since this topic has to intersect with food I decided I should go with “How does food effect athletic performance?” This question interests me a lot because it is something I can apply to my life in order to improve at my own sports. I think it will be interesting to learn about because though I know a lot about sports, I only have a basic knowledge of health and I definitely don’t know much about how food works directly related to sports. My paper can be unique from papers answering the same or similar questions by bringing my past experiences into it and also showing how I may change my diet from my research.

Feedback

On my first critical response paper I did fairly well, yet I can still do a lot to improve. From Ms. Hays’ comment I can see that the main thing I need to improve is moving on from  the high school 5 paragraph format and write more freely in order to seem like a better writer, more specifically a college writer. Also, I need a more interesting title to interest my audience. Lastly, an easy fix that Ms. Hays brought up were in-text citations, where I did well introducing my source, but I need to correctly cite the source in parenthesis after the quote. If I include and fix all of these things my next papers will instantly be much better.