Writing Ideas/Strategies:
- Careful pre-writing planning
- Using the motive formula
- Outside feedback and multiple drafts
- Taking a step back from an essay for a couple days before returning
- Constantly developing ideas in the process of writing
- Keeping the audience in mind
Reflection:
Out of all of the writing strategies and ideas that I got out of this term of writing, one of the most useful I have encountered is getting feedback from other people and using it to create multiple drafts of papers. Getting feedback from my peers was extremely helpful because it allowed me to see where my projects were falling short in terms of flow and argument logic, and getting professor feedback was also extremely helpful because of how I could get an unbiased, objective opinion on my project. Writing multiple drafts of essays also helped me tremendously because it forced me to work on my essays slowly and find wording or logic that I was not quite satisfied with. Also, by working slowly, I was able to sometimes take a step back from my essay and then look at it again with a new outlook. This meant that whatever thoughts that I had in my head before were only on the page, which then I could look at to see whether my argument was still logical and cohesive.
In Project 1, the feedback that I got from writing workshops was very helpful in improving my essay. The feedback opened my eyes to many unsubstantiated claims that I made, and also helped improve the flow and logical structure of my essay. The peer feedback allowed me to understand what I was doing well and what I was not doing so well on. This was especially helpful because the intended audience of first-year students not in the class was not too far removed from my reviewers. The faculty feedback was also incredibly helpful because it allowed me to polish the structure and argument of my essay even further. I was able to reshape my essay in a way that not only made an argument about the relationship of modern and nostalgic in architecture, but also offered a new solution to the problem of balancing the two architectural forces (an idea that came out of the conference process). Also, the conference itself was very helpful in allowing me to understand what I was really writing about because I had to put my paper thoughts into spoken words, and in the process I refined and learned more about my argument and topic.
For the second project, the peer workshop was very helpful because it allowed me to see what the audience of my project thought my essay was about. Because it was such a long essay in a non-traditional format, it was easy to just write blindly without really considering what I was arguing. My peers helped me to condense my writing into a single argument and again allowed me to see what elements of my project I was doing well and what elements I needed to work more on. Because of peer workshop, I revised my essay to be more focused on the first half of my argument, which Emma commented (at the very end) was underrepresented in my essay. Like the first project, the workshop exposed the unsubstantiated claims that I made, claims that were familiar to a Colorado native but unfamiliar to the audience of the project. Also like the first project, the conference feedback was extremely helpful in refining my project. The biggest change that the conference guided me to was completely reorganizing the results section of my essay. Before, it had been a jumbled mess of random actions, causes, and effects of the anti-fracking movement. However, because of the conference, I was able to fully grasp what a “results” section in this modified IMRD structure meant, and I was able to find an effective way of organizing my thoughts. Overall, the conference helped me in completely changing the overall scope of my project, alerting me to the fact that instead of making a new bigger picture, I was simply regurgitating and reapplying the Smith and Kurtz approach to a new example. Getting feedback allowed me revamp and reorganize my project.
In the third project, I will admit that the peer workshop was not as helpful at alerting me to changes that needed to be made as the previous workshops. Instead, the main benefit of the workshop was to allow me to understand what design and logical choices I made that were successful, so I had a good model for the changes that I did make. The conference also helped me with that, as well as pointing out some of the small details that I missed when creating my second draft. However, the conference helped me understand the biggest issue with my project, which was how I was making two different claims, one at the beginning of the project and the other at the end of the project. That way, I was able to choose which one was more in line with what I was trying to argue and also reshape my essay more around that single claim. The group conference also allowed me to see what successful techniques my group members were using, which allowed me to use them in my own project.
Being able to discuss my projects with other people was incredibly helpful and it definitely improved my writing immensely. It also helped me discover some other writing tactics and ideas that I will continue to use in the future, such as taking some time away from my drafts before coming back, keeping my audience in mind, and continually developing new ideas while writing.