Toccarra McEachern
Professor Melissa Tetterton
English 1200-078
26 April 2012
The Road to Riches
For my
final portfolio I chose to revise project two which was my blog on premarital
sex and abstinence. I chose to revise
this work because it was the project that I took for granted. I waited until the last minute to do it, and
I figured it would be easy to do in a short amount of time. I was wrong, so I found myself rushing to
complete it to the best of my ability in the last few days. Because of this, I feel as though there was a
lot of editing and revising that needed to
be done on top of the mistakes that were pointed out.
A major
issue that needed to be fixed in this project was my proofreading. When reading through these blogs one can tell
that it was rushed through, and it had many mistakes that a freshman college
student should not be making. I went
through and corrected all my proofreading mistakes such as adding periods,
changing certain words in some sentences, and I found ways to make each blog
flow better. Proofreading would not be
necessary to include in this letter if it was not serious, but as embarrassing
as it is to say, my works were very poorly edited. Editing a paper makes it easier to read,
allows the information to be processed easier in the reader’s mind, and helps
the overall flow of the paper.
A second
issue that I needed to revise was pointed out to me. It was the fact that I needed to take a
stance in my blog posts and show why and how I am taking that position. In my blogs I gave a lot of useful
information, but at times I did not put my own views into the works to add to
the conversation. I did not give the “I say” to the “they say” when
needed. Revising this and taking a
stance gives the conversation more meaning, detail, and support because it
would not make sense to just write on a controversial topic but not take a side
in how you as a writer feel about it.
I also went
through my annotated bibliography and added the relevance of the sources to my
paper. I had not done this the first
time because I did not know whether I could write it in first person for that
part of the annotation, but since I now do, I went back and corrected it. The relevance is important to the annotation
because one needs to know how this sources benefits the paper.
From this
my English 1100 class I learned to think in different ways that I was not
accustomed to think before I came to college.
I had to think and read beyond what was obvious to the naked eye. English 1200 has added on to this by not only
making me think outside of the box, but to also take a stand about how I feel
and what I have to say about the situation, issue, or topic. This class has also made me a better research
paper writer because before this class I had never understood how to use and
cite works from online databases or how to correctly construct a research
paper. I feel like a completely
different student than what I felt before taking these two English courses, but
that is a good thing because I feel more prepared and informed for future
writing classes.
