Writing Ideas and Strategies that peer and professor feedback raised for me:
- The need to continually revise and edit
- The importance of being concise and direct
- The necessity of strong topic sentences
- How to appeal to the appropriate audience
- Adjusting the format for a specific purpose
Reflection Summary
The importance of using strong communicative topic sentences is one of the principle writing strategies that shaped my work in this course. Reading about the use and how to craft these vital structural features in Williams and Bizup gave me a strong foundation for beginning my projects. But it was truly the peer reviews, conferences, and RWIT meetings which helped me to fine tune this technique in my own work. Additionally, this writing consideration took on various forms depending on the writing context, such as a thesis first essay versus the website project.
In the rough draft of my first project (Project 1-Critical Regionalism and Darius Rucker) I started out with wandering and unclear topic sentences. In the effort to include all of my evidence I did not focus as much on the organization as was necessary. After the intro I started to introduce the lens, critical regionalism, but did not tie this lens back to a firm conclusion or analysis. I then summarized the piece, but this was again disjointed from the rest of the argument. In my attempt to create a counter argument or better present information I confused readers with my following topic sentence, “However, although the background of this piece is congruent with our definition of regionalism it fail to fully reach that end by ignoring the history of the place it features”. This sample is vague and confusing and does not give readers a clear indication of what the next paragraph will be. What end? What place? The feedback I received in my peer review was to make my argument quicker. I mainly worked on rewording my introduction with that feedback. It was after my conference that I started to look at the wording of my sentences and focus on deliberately eliminating passive voice. In my RWIT meeting I was given the incredibly useful tip to make sure that every topic sentence I write connects back to, or supports my thesis statement. For example, the sample sentence provided above was altered and I added the phrase, “it cannot be considered fully critical regionalist”, in order to clarify any aspects which were unclear.
In the second project (Grass Roots Movements and Smart Growth Ballston), the technique that I adopted for crafting topic sentences was very different than that in the thesis first paper. Instead of having to make ideas flow, I was working within an already rigid and standardized organizational structure. Given the semi-ubiquitous nature of the IMRD in the research field, it was not necessary to explain the path of my ideas as much. With the section divisions, Intro, Methods, Results, Discussion, readers knew what to expect as my paper progressed. In addition, the customized subtitles which I added, such as, “Structuring Resistance”, “Scaling the Movement and Spaces of Engagement”, “Implementation of Advocacy Strategies” and “SGB Outcomes and Effectiveness” cohesively presented my main conclusion. I found that these strong sub headings allowed me to have less meticulously crafted topic sentences and allowed me to take a more direct approach in presenting the facts. These informative subtitles, which fortified my topic sentences were not present in my first draft and were edited from the conference draft to the final. My RWIT tutor suggested that I use a strong verb in all of my section headings to make them more than merely descriptive. I heeded this advice for all of the categories except discussion (SGB Outcomes and Effectiveness), which I think is inherently descriptive instead of analytical.
Publishing a website was another genre of writing which required a different take on the standard structure of topic sentences. One of the things that I was most challenged by in this assignment was the fact that it was not supposed to be too wordy, so as to make it approachable and easily digestible to readers. In general, the method I tried to implement was ‘compactness’. By trying to explain things in as concise a manner as possible I struggled to make topic sentences which communicated what was necessary without skimming over the ‘meat’ of the subject. In order to solve this dilemma it was suggested to me during my peer review that instead of using traditional topic sentences that I instead make sub titles which encapsulate the meaning of the following sentence block. Arriving at the Conference I had added these topic sentences and tried to restructure my paragraphs with more spacing, but I still was finding it hard to strike the balance between overgeneralized and too wordy. The eventual resolution was making my subtitles more ‘verbose’. While before I had been using one or two words such as, “lines of sight” or “lines of sound”, I transformed them into more substantial phrases such as “how lines of sight and sound impact the sense of publicity in a space”. Not only did this clarify my argument and message, but it improved the ‘skimability’ of my website, allowing casual readers to garner meeting from a brief look over.
It was not until this class that I realized the importance and versatility of topic sentences. More than syntax and grammar choices they are vital to many different types of communication for how they facilitate a logical flow of ideas and strengthen ones argument.