Assignment Feedback and Writing Strategies: writing strategies and feedback list

Reflection:

During my time in this Writing 5 Course, I learned to improve my writing abilities and acquired several new skills as well. One writing strategy in particular that I would like to highlight is the use of evidence. This included selecting relevant and specific evidence in order to make more convincing claims and properly citing my sources.

For the first project (Portfolio Section 3: Project 1), I discussed the extent to which the Mission Inn hotel and Spa was an example of critical regionalist architecture and applied this analysis to the scholarly debate surrounding critical regionalism using sources covered in class. Thanks to the feedback that I received for this project, I learned to more thoroughly and effectively cite my sources. In the final draft of my first project (Final Draft and post-mortem), my citations were not very consistent, and I did not always use in-text citations for every piece of information. Instead, I would only place the citations at the end of sections consisting of information contributed by a single author (Final Draft and post-mortem with feedback). Sometimes, this meant that I only had a citation at the end of a very long block of text, or perhaps only once or twice in a paragraph. This could have been confusing for my audience draft (Final Draft and post-mortem with feedback 4). I also did not introduce my sources very often. As was suggested in the feedback for the final, this would have made my information appear more credible to my readers, and would have been another good way of indicating that I planned to use information from a different source, especially after long blocks of informative text or paraphrasing.

For the first project, I was also asked to use more specific evidence, and to make sure that I was backing up all of my claims. For example, rather than saying that rooms at the Mission Inn were simply expensive, I was able to make my argument more convincing by giving an exact price (Workshop Draft). In my final draft, I improved the claim that even non-paying visitors were free to visit the hotel by mentioning that the non-profit organization that preserves the hotel offers walking tours as well as access to their historical archives (Final Draft with Post-mortem and feedback 5). In the feedback for my final draft, it was also suggested that I use more visual, concrete evidence drawn from the architecture of the Mission Inn itself to support my claim (Final…feedback 4). This advice would later come in handy for the third project, which required a substantial amount of visual evidence and personal observation.

In project 2, I examined the extent to which modern independent businesses can balance  localist goals with global expansion and growth by analyzing scholarly sources and applying them to the case of Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon (Portfolio section 4: Project 2). By using what I learned in class and through completing this project, I was able to learn about the wide variety of unique citation options and realize the importance of choosing an appropriate citation style. I included more thorough citations in the first draft of my second project, being careful to use in-text citations after each piece of information that originated from an outside source. In my first complete draft, rather than choosing the citation style that best fit my paper’s format, I automatically used the style that I was most familiar and comfortable with: MLA format (Conference Draft).  In the project 2 conference, it was pointed out to me that perhaps a format with footnotes, such as Chicago, would be more effective, especially since I planned to include additional commentary that may not have fit within the essay itself (Conference Draft 2).

Through the process of completing project 2, I also learned to do better research using library tools in order to find a higher quantity and quality of source material, and how to select and present relevant information. In the previous project, while I was aware of how to use the library catalog to find physical copies of books, I mostly used Google web searches to find my sources. Therefore, learning how to take advantage of online databases via the Dartmouth Library website was very helpful. Much of the information about Powell’s Books that I use in my final draft came from old issue of the Oregonian, which I accessed through Dartmouth’s subscription the Access World News database with help from the professor. The Oregonian website does not allow access to older articles without a subscription, so if I hadn’t known about this database, I wouldn’t have had nearly as much information to support my case-level argument.  During the second unit of class, I also learned to evaluate the credibility of my sources in order to build my paper on a more solid foundation. One of my sources, which I used for my conference draft, provided a lot of information on the history of Powell’s Books (Conference Draft). However, I decided to discard it because like Wikipedia, anyone could contribute to it. The conference for this project also urged me to truly think about which information was relevant and convincing. Initially, I thought it was worthwhile to include information about the physical appearance of Powell’s Books (Workshop Draft and Conference Draft), but it was pointed out to me during the conference that this information was actually unrelated to my argument (Conference Draft 5). Because most of the papers I had written in high school were literary analyses, I used a lot of quotes in the first two drafts of this assignment (Workshop Draft and Conference Draft), especially as I introduced my lens sources in the Methods section. However, I learned through the feedback that I received during the conference that sometimes a summary or paraphrasing is better.

The third project (Portfolio Section 5: Project 3), in which I discussed the extent to which Novack Cafe could build a sense of community on Dartmouth’s campus, was also a challenge in terms of citation, as it had a completely different format from the previous two projects.  It was a web page rather than a traditional paper. Initially, I did not use the thorough in-text citations, as I had learned to use in my other projects (Workshop Draft). Instead, I just included a list of sources in one of my web-pages. In a later revision, I included limited citations, linking them to my acknowledgements page (Conference Draft). For the final draft, I included links as in-text citations, but instead of linking them to another part of my website, I linked them to their respective home-pages, allowing my audience to explore these sites for themselves. For example, I provided a link to the Dartmouth admissions cite from which I used statistics concerning the diversity of the Dartmouth Class of 2019. In the case of a journal article by David J. Fleming that served as my most important source, I provided a link to the website where I downloaded the excerpt. This project did not seem to need as much in-text citation as the others did, because much of the evidence came from personal observation. I was unsure whether or not to cite sources after every piece of information in my website as I would in a paper, so I tried to introduce my sources in my prose more often, especially in the separate section that focuses on the ideas of David Fleming.

Due to the mainly visual and observational nature of this project, I had to use a different set of skills to incorporate evidence. This included the use of physical descriptions and photographs to explain the significance of the cafe’s physical features, careful explanation of charts and diagrams, and a skill introduced during unit 2: graphic design and using nonverbal communication to convey meaning. However, I was still able to apply the skills that I had learned in the previous two projects, such as deciding whether or not information was relevant and providing specific, concrete evidence. For example, I was asked to support that claim that Dartmouth College was diverse by providing statistics.

Overall, I have acquired many important tools for writing in a variety of contexts thanks to what I learned from lectures and the collaborative writing process. Finding, incorporating, and citing evidence has been an area in which I have learned the most new skills and have been able to improve as a result. In future class, I feel that being able to properly use strong, diverse, detailed, and relevant evidence will help me to write more convincing and effective papers.