Reflection on Open Letter Draft

We made it to the end of the semester and one of the last blog posts!  For this project I peer reviewed Casey's and Chelsea's drafts.

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Did you demonstrate an ability to think about your writing and yourself as a writer?

I think I was able to explain how my writing abilities progressed over the semester.  Although my writing style has stayed relatively consistent, my writing process has developed a bit more.  I mainly talked about how my revision and brainstorming processes have definitely been forced to improve over the last semester.  The structure of the class being measured by step by step blogs incites a lot more planning and editing than I have ever done in the past.

Did you provide analysis of your experiences, writing assignments, or concepts you have learned?

Yes, my high school writing experience compared to this class was one of my main points in the draft.  Blogging in itself is an entirely different ball game from that of AP essays and endless scholarship prompts.  Our work with genre, audience, and writing process will apply to future projects, but technologically and structure wise, this course was very unique.

Did you provide concrete examples from your own writing (either quotes from your writing or rich descriptions of your writing process)?

Yes, I made sure to link to other examples that applied directly to the main points of each paragraph.  I think I can still add a few more direct examples about concepts we learned, but I think the context level is close to where I want it to be.  I referenced a few examples I felt I was the most successful with and a few that I spent a few too many hours on.

Did you explain why you made certain choices and whether those choices were effective?

I think I can add to this particular section, especially with the variety of different blog types and concepts we learned.  However, a lot of my decision making had to do with time management, so the general theme of the draft is centered around my planning problems and improvement.

Did you use specific terms and concepts related to writing and the writing process?

Yes, I referenced examples from specific assignment prompts and general lectures from class.  Revision, genres, rhetorical strategies were a couple of the ideas that I touched upon in the draft.

Draft of an Open Letter

Here is a link to the rough draft of my final project.

It is a little rough as a lot of it is very similar to the original drafts from this deadline.  It would be great to know if the structure of the letter is audience friendly and if I need to add more information or get rid of anything in the rough draft.  I also have not yet added quotations from my previous blogs as I had forgotten quotations are necessary.  Sorry for posting this so late in the day, currently the draft has no peer reviews so any comments are greatly appreciated!

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Reflecting More on My Writing Process

In this blog I will continue my reflection on my writing process as a sort of brainstorming for the final project.

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1. Biggest challenges faced
Time management was by far the biggest issue.  I enjoyed writing about a topic that I loved, but in the beginning of the course I tended to write too much and burnt out creatively on the first few blogs of a section.  I also did not monitor how long each blog was taking me.  Entire saturdays flew by and deadlines got published at the last minute, which is, to say the least, stressful.

2. What I learned about time management, writing, and editorial skills
This course was definitely a personal crash course in time management.  All of the coursework was easily doable if time managed well.  Of course, that doesn't always work out and procrastination has a wonderful way of creating a lot of stress.  I will say some blog weeks were worse than most, but by the end of the course, my efficiency and planning was much less stressful.  My editing and revision skills overall were much improved as I hadn't been required to edit my writing for the last four years.

3. The concept of 'genre'
This course was definitely a discussion in genre.  The effectiveness of each piece that I have and will write depends on if I correctly identify the genre and write with the genre in mind.  I could not write an entirely opinionated article for a scientific journal nor a QRG for a letter to a publisher.  Genre is of equal importance to audience and content.  The correct style is automatic credibility boost and improves how the information is relayed.

4. Skills for future courses
The types of brainstorming and revision are definitely going to be helpful for the future.  This was a great course to remind me how much work goes into writing a published piece.  Although the research and content is important, the delivery of that information is crucial to the audience.  The best articles and books go through weeks upon weeks of revisions and rewrites.  Real world writing is a lot different than AP writing.

5. Most effective moment
Writing the first QRG was one of my more effective moments.  The combination of revisions, incorporating technologies, and writing such a huge comprehensive piece right of the bat was a great boost to my writing.  It was about an issue I cared about and I had the freedom to choose how I portrayed my opinion.  I enjoyed almost all of the blogs that I wrote because I had the freedom to write using my own style and use the blogs creatively.  Of course, the amount of blogs and a few of the more technical blogs were not as creatively encouraging, but the nitty gritty is still just as important as the creative freedom.

6. Least effective moment
My time management and the dedication of entire saturdays to blogging was not my most effective moment.  It was not smart to choose to leave 12 hours of work to a single day.  It was exhausting and counter productive to improving my writing.  I am very glad that the writing amomunt of the course got easier throughout the semester, as I would not have made it through with some of my time management at the beginning of the semester.

Revising my Writing Process

As this class comes to a close I will be reviewing a few blogs I wrote at the very beginning of the semester about my Writing Process and my Calendar.

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Writing Process

In my first blog, I classified myself as a procrastinator with the hopes of writing more like a sequential composer.  I can definitely say that procrastination is still a factor in my writing, but my processes in revision and rewriting have definitely improved.  Most of my writing in high school was a single draft timed essay, so I have become used to quickly writing a large amount of passable writing.  The course forced me to go through long brainstorming, planning, and revision.  Instead of crashing through a first draft and publishing it as a final, I felt a lot more comfortable with going back and rereading my writing.  This process definitely encouraged me to go towards a more sequential composer style of writing.

Calendar

Despite improvements, I definitely did not get rid of procrastination and spent many Saturdays completely devoted to blogging.  As I noted in my calendar, I was not used to having homework time in the middle of the day.  I spent the last four years doing all of my homework either in class or starting at 10PM after extra curriculars.  The work load this semester was close to what I expected, but time management was a lot more difficult.  My habit at working in the later hours continued and I wasted a lot of daylight.  This forced the blogging to Saturday as I spent my weekdays working on other homework and pushing the blogging as late as possible.  Unfortunately, after multiple weeks of doing this I did get very good at dedicating 12 hours to just blogging, but it was not the most productive thing to do.  I did improve as the semester went on, as I was tired of blogging all day every Saturday.  The blogs also became a little less time consuming, which was definitely appreciated.  In the future my time management could either massively improve or ruin my chances at success.  Currently I'm headed in the right direction, especially as my class scheduling is infinitely better than when I had no idea what to expect.