- Describe your essay’s most notable strength, using at least one direct quote from your work to support your choice.
I think that my most notable strengths in this essay were my use of personal voice and my naysayer paragraph.
“I understand how it doesn’t really seem like the two go hand in hand, but if you incorporate Wallace’s view that YOU get to choose how YOU react to a situation, you’ll reason that you don’t have to react the same way as the people we observe.”
This quote is a piece of my naysayer where I think I did a good job bringing in the opposing view, which was that we rely on watching others to learn, but then also sharing my view which was that we need to kind of live for ourselves.
- Describe the differences in your revision process from Essay #1 to Essay #2. How has your revision process improved? Call attention to one place in your 2nd essay where revision helped significantly.
I think that I revised my second essay a lot more than my first one. In my opinion my rough draft was weaker the second time around and needed a lot of touching up. A big fix I think was revising the thesis since the original thesis I had was a trainwreck. Another big piece of revision was re-organizing the conclusion paragraph because at first it was just a bunch of sentences thrown together.
- Briefly analyze your integration of source material. What techniques did you use to synthesize source materials within your 2nd essay?
I think that I did an alright job at combining all my sources throughout the essay. Not the best but also not the worst. Two big things that help me with using quotes in my essay are using the they say I say templates and picking out my quotes before I even start the essay. Analyzing and introducing quotes has always been a weakness of mine so I have found the templates very helpful.
- Copy and paste your final draft’s strongest claim sentence into your post, then analyze it briefly. What makes it your strongest claim? How has your voice been integrated as part of your academic writing so far this semester?
“There’s a danger that comes with choosing to only concentrate on ourselves and it’s that we lose focus on what may be going on in the world around us.”
I think this is a strong claim and it was a sentence I actually added during revision. I think it’s a strong claim because it kind of sums up what the majority of my essay will be about and kind of grabs attention. I integrate my voice a decent amount in my essays and sort of rely on doing that when I don’t know what else to add. In these essays so far I have used my personal experience to relate to the quotes I add.
- Paste then analyze your thesis statements from the first and second essay. How do they compare? Note similarities/differences. Which is stronger and why?
The use of social media creates a warped sense of how communication works by encouraging our ability to send a snapchat but decreasing our ability to hold a conversation. (first essay)
Dealing with daily frustrations influences my own instinctive self absorbedness, so adjusting how I face these adverse encounters encourages me to not take things so personally. (second essay)
What’s similar about these are that they are about the same length and I also feel like I format them the same way, kind of breaking the sentence down into three parts. I do think that my first thesis is stronger though because it’s more straightforward and direct than my second one.
