DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Focusing my thoughts has always been a difficulty in writing for me, and so Project #1 overwhelmed me at first. I thought, “How should I write if I have to talk about a person?” Seeing the opinions of those who read my first draft allowed me to see the big mistake I was making: my paper did not support my purpose. At first, my aim was to be informative so that my readers could understand the context properly. Then I realized that my words lacked emotion. I needed a purpose! I then changed my language by focusing on my subject (the Virginia Tech massacre) rather than focusing on relaying information - what political debates were brought up afterwards. My purpose became specific! I actually enjoyed reading my own work afterwards and I could see the direction I was taking, which was to tell the story of what happened that day. Since then, I have learned a lot about how to focus on a purpose when writing. Beforehand, my sentences did not flow well and my language was confusing. I was all over the place! But now I have a better understanding of how to intrigue my audience and how to write with a single purpose in mind. 

 

For the second project, I found that I still lacked focus in my work. It was hard to write analytically because I wanted to write more freely about Hungry Planet. The topic touched me emotionally and so I wanted to talk about the project rather than one picture. The point of the assignment was to analyze the rhetorical appeals of one visual. At first, I focused too much on the context of corporations controlling the food industry and not enough on the picture I was supposed to be analyzing. I would draw away from points, that were still relevant to the topic, such as that the corporations were solely at fault for the crisis in our food industry. Because of my lack of connection between my statement and the evidence, I had a hard time bringing my discussion back to it's primary focus - rhetorical appeals. With much editing and reading my words back to myself, I learned how to still do what the assignment assigned me to do a but still give the emotion I wanted to add. I feel like by the end of the course, I improved my focus a good amount. I'm definitely not perfect yet, but if I actually go through my entire essays and paragraphs and solely think about my purpose, I can actually cleverly make the sentences flow together, and the paragraphs actually make more sense and combine as a whole.

 

The purpose of constructing an analysis is to inform with solid evidence. This took me a while to fully understand. The way I think and the way my brain works in very sporadic. I jumble from topic to topic, and I, myself, realize the connection. However, I'm used to the way I connect my ideas, and so I must explain thoroughly how I came across those ideas to my audience when writing. In my second project, out of the blue, I stated my favourite food was Macaroni and Cheese. To me, this made sense. I was saying this to show that the common foods I eat in my culture differ from others. However, I didn't explain this concept at all, and so that sentence really confused my reader's, and I received some reviews that were completely in awe and questioning why I even put that fact in my essay. Going back, I had to think, "How did I connect these ideas again?" and then construct better sentences based off of those ideas. When writing analytically, you especially have to succeed in following the outline of an essay. I realized, through my own errors, that my meaning and my focus would get lost because I lacked any explanation of my evidence.

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.