Monday, October 29, 2012
Paper oh paper, what have I done wrong?
So in my paper about the short story “Fiesta” I understand what I did wrong and how I can better improve my paper. First thing is that i need to improve on my academic voice. One thing I struggle with when I am writing a paper is I want it to be as relatable as possible; I want people to feel as though they have really connected with me through my paper, as if they have heard my voice. That is not necessarily a bad thing but what is bad about that is that when I try to make my paper easier to relate to I lose my academic voice, I’m no longer identifying the characters by their names, but I start saying kid or people. When I depersonalize my characters makes my paper less academic. Secondly I tend to go off on tangents; when I make a thesis that is the idea or thought or argument I plan on writing my paper on. When I actually start writing my paper the paragraph normally falls right along with the thesis statement, but in this paper I start to fall away from the thesis. I think that in this particular paper my thesis is not strong enough to cover what it is that I am trying to prove in my paper. Then there are my grammatical errors; not ending quotes the way they should be ended and putting commas in the right place which stem from the lack of proofreading my essay before it gets turned in. Another issue is when I made a claim then went on to try and incorporate my quotation to support my claim rather than completely dissecting that quotation so that it fit into my claim and supported the thesis I more summarized what was happening in the story around that quotation rather than analyzing how that quotation fits into my paper based off of the literary element that I was supposed to be talking about. Summarizing is OK to point but it should just be adding detail to my claim rather than fully explaining. So I really need to focus on analyzing the text. Not just analyzing though but working on including more text support. I think that when I am actually discussing a novel or short story in a seminar I use more text support and dissect the text more than when I am actually writing a paper about the novel or short story because sometimes I feel like I am using so much text that my whole paper is the novel rather than the dissection. I need to work on balancing using the text and dissecting the text. The last thing that Mrs. Clinch pointed out in my paper was to watch for awkward and wordy constructions; what I have noticed in this paper is that my sentences are either too long or awkwardly put together, I need to work on clearly organizing each sentence, shorten them add in commas, colons, semicolons, etc. by being more concise in my sentence I will be able to better produce stronger, clearer papers.
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