Monday, February 25, 2008
Rhetorical Analysis Reflection
“One must have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star” – Nietzsche. The power comes from not hanging your head down but picking yourself up and striving to do the best you can. The way you learn is from your mistakes and when you pull through you realize the power within yourself. Every great thing you do starts with disappointment. In order to do the best you can you have to keep your head high. I believe the saying “You learn something new every day.” I think I have learned a lot of important lessons from this single paper. I will take each mistake into consideration and improve it on my synthesis paper. There is room for improvement and now I know and am able to understand what Nick is looking for within writing, and within a paper. I am a little disappointed with my grade because I know I can do better, although that just motivates me to try harder. The thing I need to work on the most is writing clearly instead of getting fancy with my writing. I tend to focus too much on elaborating on a subject and not stating what I want to say clearly. My sentences tend to be wordy and very in depth, and I need to cut down on my sentences and make them less wordy. It seems he is looking for a more factual form of writing in order for it to be clear and precise. If I focus more on a writing style such as this, I believe I will receive the grade I am looking for. Also, I need to constantly revise my paper for grammatical errors. I need to be careful on commas and quotations. Something that might help is having someone other than Nick also read my paper to check for errors. The writing center may possibly be a useful source. I have never been there personally, although I have heard it is very helpful. Even though my paper had flaws I also had some very good quotes to support what I was trying to say. All of my quotes were cited properly. I also made sure to really focus on the audience and keep them in mind throughout my entire paper. It is important to focus on you reader so they are aware at all times what you are talking about. I have always thought of myself as a decent writer and I know that in this class I will exceed. I’m excited to see the grades I will receive on my next papers after learning from my mistakes. I will continue to try my hardest to get the grades I want and hopefully they will continue to rise. I want an A in the class and to do this I will work hard. The effort I put into my paper from here on out will show. I know I will be proud of whatever I do because I know I will be trying my hardest.
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3 comments:
Kim, a really interesting, well-expressed reflection. Your advice in there would serve as great inspiration for your classmates, and I hope they too appreciate your words. You have good insight as to a need for simple, clear precision in language, and you should know that you are by no means alone in having to endure a learning curve in order to achieve a higher level of concise, direct language. It is a common hurdle for novice writers, but one that is easily cleared with a bit of effort and dedication, as you so rightly say.
I like your quote of Nitzsche a lot and it very well explains my thoughts on failure or let’s say disappointment in oneself. You mentioning that people learn from their mistakes and that sometimes things, like for instance the synthesis paper, just need a little more effort and dedication but after investing the time and energy, most of the time it pays off and you can be happy afterwards with the good results you achieved. Additionally, I agree with you when you say motivation is the driver for you to write a better paper. I feel exactly the same way as I am almost 1000% sure that if other, less skilled people are able to write good papers that we definitely can pull this off. You mentioned the writing center as a helpful tool to improve on papers, I will have an appointment tomorrow to brush up my synthesis paper and if you want you can just ask me questions about the outcome/the improvements and whether it is actually helpful to go there. It’s my first time at the writing center and I am really looking forward to getting some help with my synthesis paper…
You seem very confident in your future endeavors. Your papers are going to be awesome from now on, I can feel it. I like your quote about chaos and stuff. It's very very deep. Okay, just kidding. I have found that receiving peer editing from multiple people really helps me in my papers. Find a couple people outside of class to read your paper to help you get an outside perspective.
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