Peer Reviews

It was helpful to get input about my paper from Liz. I was surprised at how much she liked it! I wasn't sure if it was a good topic or if my writing style was affective, so it was nice to be encouraged :) She did mention that the flow was a little choppy, so I am working to change that. I'm adjusting the structure to hopefully make the transitions smoother from paragraph to paragraph. Thanks for reading and giving your input, Liz! I think it is always a helpful exercise to have classmates edit each other's papers.

Thoughts on Essay Writing

Reading those articles gave me some good insights on essay writing. All throughout high school I was constantly writing essays, but I never stopped to think about what exactly an essay was and how it differed from other types of writing. It was interesting to see how an essay is compared to an article. The main thing that sets an essay apart is the personal voice of the writer that comes out. I don't usually have a problem letting my personal voice get incorporated into my writing-- usually, I have the reverse problem. If I am assigned to write an article or more factual report, I have to control my own opinions from leaking into the piece. That's why it was so fun to write the rough draft for this essay-- I was able to let loose and let many of the things the article was talking about, like using personal voice, telling and showing instead of trying too hard to prove yourself, etc., incorporate themselves into my essay. I know I still need to tweak the rough draft a lot, but reading these articles encouraged me that it's ok for my personal tone to be prevalent in this type of writing!

feedback on the feedback

First of all I would like to thank my parents for always calling me Becca instead of Rebecca so even though I really should have been one of the last batches of people to get feedback on my research proposal, I lucked out and was counted as one of the 'B's at the beginning of the alphabet :)

Secondly, I would like to thank Prof. Scott for spending time reading and commenting on all these proposals. I wasn't expecting the commentary to be so detailed and specific-- it really helped that the comment bubbles were directly attached to a specific excerpt from the paper. I was encouraged by the positive feedback in her overall statement, but I was also glad to see that she was able to point out a lot of things for me to work on as well. I felt as if my paper could've been improved in various ways and her feedback pinpointed exactly what to change and how. Definitely a very helpful form of revising papers!

Oops...

so I've been slacking off on the blog here lately. I forgot we were supposed to blog every week, regardless of whether there was something specific assigned or not... so I'll try to step it up a bit from now on!

Last week's group sessions were helpful to me. It's good to get other people's perspectives on your writing and figure out how to make each of our proposals work better. I still have some sections in my proposal that I feel are definitely lacking, so I'm glad we are having the conferences this week to discuss that. Plus, I love Au Bon Pain. The mozzarella tomato pesto sandwich is amazzingg and totally animal-friendly! Also the racks and racks of pastries are always wonderful to look at and imagine what it would be like to indulge in all those wonderful sugary calories and carbs. Perhaps I will indulge a little tomorrow after my conference... :)

Oh and one last thing about ABP-- is anyone else bothered by the fact that no one can pronounce its full name correctly?? Some can get through the ''au'' and the ''bon'' pretty well, but when it comes to the "pain'' I always find myself cringing at the epic slaughter of the French language.