Sophie,
This semester I have written, read and researched different articles and topics. I stayed up late typing on my computer, editing and reediting my essays. But now that my first semester of college is coming to an end, it is time to reflect on my work that I’ve constructed and perfect it for posterity. I decided to revise my first college essay, my research essay proposal and two of my critical responses.
When I began my first ever college essay, I was extremely nervous to embark on this daunting journey. The rubric was peppered with words I did not understand like Toulmin method and rhetorical analysis. I was not sure that I would be able to correctly complete the assignment and had no clue what artifact I would choose to research. At the Archives Research Center I was instantly drawn to Campus Cues, an instructional book written by Irene Pierson. Although I did not do the stellar job I had hoped for on this first assignment, I was still grateful to have learned about the way women lived on campus during the fifties and sixties. I hope to revise this paper by adding the Toulmin Analysis and further discuss the books relationship to the Rhetorical Triangle.
The next assignment I will fix is the proposal and annotated bibliography I wrote for my research paper. This assignment was the first step towards crafting our research paper. In the proposal, I wrote about my topic and defended my reasoning for choosing it and believing it to be exigent. In the annotated bibliography, all of the sources I had planned on using were accompanied by two paragraphs explaining the importance of the article pertaining to my topic. Aside from some small grammatical errors, my proposal needs very little editing. On the other hand, my annotated bibliography will need to be carefully reconstructed. In high school my works cited pages were minimally graded and although they were also done in MLA format, I learned little about constructing them properly. I think it is important to know how to properly construct a Works Cited page and therefore I hope to learn from revisions that I make to my annotated bibliography.
For the next two minor assignments, I have chosen to edit Critical Response papers. Firstly, I will revise my first Critical Response about the Power of Hello and then I will move on to the second paper about Adler, LaMott and Bradbury. I found the topics of both of these writing assignments to be extremely interesting. Therefore, going back and editing these papers will not be as boring of a task.
I hope that by revising these papers I will be more careful in the future. I also hope that when you read these essays, you will be able to understand them better and learn from my mistakes. You can learn from the content of these papers as well because the topics I have written about are both interesting and informative. Wish me luck, Sophie!