Workshop Reflection

After work shopping with my inquiry group, a few things became apparent to me regarding me writing. This was a learning experience for me. I have never written an exploratory essay prior to this and I wasn’t quite sure how to go about doing it. I quickly realized that I couldn’t write this paper as I had written others in the past. It was challenging in the fact that I had to make connections between multiple articles as well as quote the articles and use what the other is saying rather my opinion towards a subject. My Inquiry group mates were very helpful in assessing my paper and giving me feedback as to what I could do better.

What advice did you receive from each member of your group?

Meredith was very helpful in her advising. She has the same issues with writing that I do. We tend to be opinionated in our writing and can also tend to over write and stray from the topic at hand. She suggested that instead of using my opinion to use quote the author and agree or disagree with the stance of the author. She said to use the writing as evidence and relate it back to what I am stating. Furthermore, she liked the placement of my questions and the fact that with some questions I asked them and then stated an answer; others I left for the reader to ponder about.

Lynnsey said a lot of what Meredith said as well. She suggested that I steer away from my opinions and to connect with the author more. One suggestion that was very helpful was for me to go through and highlight my opinions and then go find a quote from the articles that I can use to replace the opinionated statement. One thing I was very thankful that Lynnsey did was, as we were reading the paper, she was correctly some grammatical errors and underlined words that may not be the best choice for the sentence.

Joseph agreed with both Meredith and Lynnsey regarding the opinion statements. He suggested that I break the larger paragraphs with questions in to more paragraphs to separate them out and make it flow better. He suggested that I use a few of the golden lines form the articles in to convey my opinion indirectly.

What was the most/least helpful piece of advice you received?

The most helpful piece of advice I received was, instead of using my opinion to convey a message, to use quotes from the articles to convey my opinion indirectly as well as state the authors’ opinion. The least helpful piece of advice would have to be the grammatical errors. After reading the paper through I was able to catch most of the grammatical errors myself. I still do appreciate that they took the time and effort to correct them.

What are your plans for revision?

I plan on sitting down and re-reading my paper first off. As I read through it I am going to high light each opinionated sentence. For every grammatical error I find I am going to use a different colored writing utensil to mark it with what it should be. After going through my paper I am going to re-read every article and highlight the lines that I feel would be of benefit to my paper. I am going to find lines that complement each other as well as some that pose questions to the others accuracy of information. This will allow a basis for me to be able to discuss each side without using my opinion. I plan on keeping my intro relatively the same. The body will be structured differently. I am going to break the larger paragraphs in to smaller more intimate paragraphs that will most likely contain my questions. My conclusion currently is non-existent. It needs to be rewritten and needs to be able to convey my thesis clearly.

One thing I know I need to do, as well as the rest of my group members, is learn how to appropriately quote inline citations. None of us knew how to do that correctly. I know that I didn’t quote any of my quotes thus far.