I am working to achieve this goal by looking at my peers suggestions and making changes to global and local issues in my paper because of these suggestions. For example, I had a sentence at the end of one of my body paragraphs that, as one of my peers pointed out, was making the same claim as a sentence I had already put in the paragraph. I went back and looked at it and he was right, so I deleted the sentence. Deleting this sentence made my paper less repetitive, which was something that I thought was an issue throughout the paper. I hope to be able to continue to use my peers suggestions to help improve global issues of my paper, as well as local issues, such as spelling and sentence structure.
The sentence I deleted: People not going to college will affect the economy because universities won’t have the funds to be able to pay for all the expenses that they have, which will cause professors and other employees of the university to lose their jobs and eventually the university will have to shut down.
I had already mentioned this earlier in the paper, so it didn’t help my paper in any way.
I am trying to summarize the ideas of others more in order to support my claims. In the first draft of my paper, I made claims but some of them I never provided evidence to support these claims. I think that if I become better at summarizing other people’s ideas, my papers will make a lot more sense. By doing this, I will also be able to make the length requirement a lot easier. My first draft for this paper did not meet the length requirement, so I took my peers suggestions and used them to help me make it longer. There was one claim I had made where one of my peers suggested I should either expand on the claim by putting evidence in to expand on and support the claim or I should use it to a new paragraph.
The claim: This negatively affects the economy because the more dependent on their parents people become, the less they contribute to the economy.
My peer suggested that I could use this claim to transition into a new paragraph which would talk about the economy, or that I could put in quotes to help expand on and support the claim.
Being able to read actively and critically is something I think I could really improve on. I didn’t get enough practice with it in high school, and I think this class can really help me with this. I think I’ve already improved with this skill when comparing what I did for the first paper and what I’ve done for the second one, but I still believe there’s room for improvement. For the second paper, when I was thinking about the claims I wanted to make and the evidence I wanted to use, I went through the readings again and highlighted quotes that I could potentially use in my paper. I did not do that when I was thinking about evidence for the first paper. This strategy was really helpful for me because it was easier to find the quotes when I needed them. I will use this strategy for the next papers and hopefully I can find new strategies to use while writing other papers.
When I’m peer editing, I’m used to looking for more local changes rather than global changes. In class, we have talked about how important it is to first look for global changes, then look for local changes. I have found myself ultimately reading my peers papers twice when doing peer reviews. The first time through I will make comments on global changes that I think they should make. The suggestions I think I tend to make have to do with the claims they made and how they can expand on them more. Then I’ll go through the paper again and make local revisions. I think it’s important for the writer to have someone else go through their paper and not only make suggestions for global changes, but for local changes too. Sometimes when writing a paper, you don’t realize little grammatical or spelling errors, which is why it’s helpful for a peer to comment on both kinds of revisions.
Citing my sources is something I’ve never been confident doing and it is definitely something that I need to improve on. I think The Little Seagull Handbook is a really useful resource to turn to when making a works cited. In high school, I would use a site called “easybib.com” when I had to make a works cited. On this site, you put all of the information you know about the source(like the title, the author, when it was published, etc.) and it puts it into correct MLA format for you. I relied on this site a lot throughout high school, which is why I think I’m not confident when having to write a works cited. I hope taking this course and having The Little Seagull Handbook as a reference will make me more confident when I cite my sources throughout my papers and when I write a works cited.
Sentence length is a pattern of error that I’ve noticed in my papers. Sometimes I tend to write sentences that are too long. When I write these sentences and then go back and read them, I know that I can break them up into separate sentences, but I notice that I have a hard time with that. Another pattern that I’ve noticed is that I can sometimes have trouble combining one idea into one sentence. This was pointed out to me by one of my peers when they were reviewing my paper, and when I tried to fix it, I really struggled on how to do so.
The idea: Even though I think considering “emerging adulthood” an official life stage could potentially be very beneficial, it wouldn’t be easy to do and I think the downfalls of it would be much more significant. This is because in the beginning, considering “emerging adulthood” an official life stage will likely negatively affect society’s economy as a whole. It would change the economy by potentially changing legal ages for certain entertainment, when people become independent from their parents, if and when people go to college, jobs going out of existence, the ages that people start working, and the fact that people will settle to a particular job much later than older generations.
My peer suggested that I should combine this idea into one topic sentence. I agreed with him because the idea should and could be one topic sentence, but I couldn’t figure out a way to properly word it in one sentence.
