I noticed that the originality report did not catch a lot of my plagiarism at all!  There was an abundance of academic integrity that I know I violated on purpose, but the originality report did not catch any of them. For my assignment I plagiarized by just summarizing the abstract, straight-up copy and pasting, badly paraphrasing, and by misrepresenting the ideas in this source. The originality reporter did not catch any of these unfortunately.

The one breach of academic integrity that the originality reporter caught was that I that I had the same sentence as another student. This was the sentence that I had just copied and pasted from my source, so that is probably why that sentence was in another students paper.  How didn’t it catch that the sentence had been stolen from the source?

Unfortunately this makes me distrust technology. Teachers should be aware that technology can glitch, similar to how it did on my paper. Fortunately there is an investigation that has to be launched before a student’s paper is ultimately deemed as plagiarism. If there was not an investigation students could be punished just because of an error in the originality reporter.

As of right now, I do not trust the originality reporter as much as I would like to.

In Peggy Macintosh’s article entitled “unpacking the invisible knapsack” about white privilege, she said “I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.” I am always used to being called pretty, but an insult softly follows. I cannot count how many time I was asked if I was mixed because I was pretty. I did not realize how offensive this was because this idea of being mixed if you are pretty has been pumped into my brain since I was young. I see the issue in this statement now though. Why is that for me to be considered beautiful I cannot be African-American. It is as if saying that being African-American alone cannot be pretty. As Macintosh explains, an African-American cannot do well or poorly in anything without my race being used an explanation. My race is not explanation for me being pretty. Why are you commanding me for being black and getting good grades? These types of things are unconsciously making me feel inferior as a person due to my ethnicity. Therefore, STOP ASKING IF I AM MIXED JUST BECAUSE I AM PRETTY!

After viewing most of my assignments I see that big issues of mine are conclusions and grammar. In a couple of my papers I have noticed that I have a hard time wrapping a pretty bow around most of papers. I do not know how to close out well without seeming rushed, repetitive, or simple. It is like my conclusion just does not keep up with the rest of my paper.

I have also learned that I sometimes talk in passive voice to make my writing sound more sophisticated, but I usually end up sounding even worse. Passive voice usually just leads to bunch of unnecessary words that have the potential to just confuse readers. I now see the importance of writing in active voice.

From eating soup out of a strainer to eating soup out of a bowl. In my metaphor, the Soup is my mind. Whenever I am given a writing assignment, I have an overwhelming number of thoughts and ideas that overflow my mind. As a writer, I often had a hard time getting all of my thoughts out on paper. It was as if my ideas were soup, and I would pour my ideas into a spaghetti strainer by the time I was putting the pen to paper.

I love chicken noodle soup so let’s just say my thoughts are  chicken noodle soup to be exact. Chicken noodle soup usually has chunky pieces of chicken and vegetables. Once my ideas are strained only the big chunky pieces of chicken and vegetables are left but there is NO BROTH. The chicken and vegetables represent big ideas but the broth represents the detail.  My essays would be left strained, full of big ideas without any detailed reasoning. 

I found a bowl now!! I have discovered my very own version of a rough-rough draft. I just get everything down on paper regardless of how ridiculous or illiterate it may be. By just jotting down all of my ideas as soon as they pop into my head helps me to form a rough draft later on without leaving a single thought out. A rough-rough draft allows me to have not only have chicken, vegetables and broth in a bowl, but also adds a little extra seasoning to my soup called organization. I have found my bowl for my soup and I will never let it go!

All my life all I have heard of, in terms of political parties, are the democrats and the republicans. I am sort of familiar with each of the parties stances on most issues, so I wanted to look into a different political party for once. I chose to look into the libertarian party because I have already heard of the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and Green Party. I am curious to find out about the liberation stance on abortion because abortions are something I feel passionate about. Just like in Gerald’s interview, I wanted to research something with a fresh mind, for I felt like it would be more interesting to look into a brand new topic. Also, I am examining their ideas on abortion through the fact that I care about a political party’s stance on that subject, for Vonnegut believes that a compelling paper starts with a genuine passion for the subject. I know absolutely nothing about the liberation party which reduces my bias on how that party feels about abortions. I will be combining Gerald’s idea of writing about a topic with a fresh mind and Vonneguts idea of writing about a subject you care about in my analysis paper on the liberation stance on abortions.

I came out to very good start on my paper with a strong and mysterious title. I also did a good job of introducing sources, and connecting them to both my personal life and other sources. I did not do so well in the grammar aspect of my paper. Although slight, there are a handful of grammatically issues that I can work on through different passages in my student handbook. My handbook, a Writer’s Reference, has many different explanations of some of my grammatical issues that I did not quite understand. My lowest score in my critical response was the grammar portion, for I plan on doing more reading on simple grammatically issues in my handbook. I will do this so that small grammar issues can be avoided in the future. Also, I will work on proofreading my papers more than once to ensure that I have not made any simple mistakes that could have been fixed if I had just read my paper more carefully.

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