Learning Outcome 1: My approach to revision has changed a lot over the course of this semester. Before taking this class, I didn’t know many revision techniques, and my final drafts did not improve much from my rough drafts. Throughout this class, I discovered many ways to improve my claims and support my thesis, which has in turn improved my writing greatly. One of techniques I’ve found most effective is highlighting my paper after I finish my first draft. By highlighting my thesis and claims, I’m able to make sure my evidence and claim sentences effectively support my thesis. It also makes it easy for me to tell when something isn’t providing enough support, and I can go back and reword either my claims or my thesis to make it better. That was one of the most beneficial techniques I learned in English 110, and has helped my writing a lot. I have also learned the benefits of having others read my papers, whether it is a classmate, roommate or professor. Doing peer review activities in class gave me baseline feedback that I could work off of and use to improve my later drafts. I would copy and paste my first draft into a separate Word document and keep my peers’ comments on the Google Doc so I could still look at them, and I would review them as I revised my paper to make sure I was paying attention to their thoughts. Once I finished my formal draft, I went through the comments one more time throughout my paper to make sure I didn’t leave anything out; this emphasized how much my paper had improved and made me feel more confident in my work.

Learning Outcome 2: In this class, I have learned how to use evidence to support my thesis, not the other way around. I really struggled with analysis in my high school papers and tended to use claims that supported the reading I had done. This semester, I had to work on including evidence only when it backed up the claims I was making. I also worked on minimizing my paraphrasing of readings, which was tough. In English 110, I got a lot of feedback on how I needed to write more of my own opinions and less about the opinions of the other writers. I think I have improved a lot in this way; in my last paper, I tried especially hard to only use Armstrong’s ideas when they strongly supported my claims. I’ve also been working on using more concise quotes in my papers. I find that it’s easy to include a whole paragraph in my paper, but that sometimes I lose focus of why I included it and my paper becomes slightly confusing for the reader. By using ellipses in my quotes to skip over unnecessary phrases, I was able to make my evidence much more effective and therefore improve my paper. For example, in my Significant Writing Project I wrote “I believe that by combining the two perspectives, many more opportunities will become available. This can be done in many ways, whether it is encouraging art students to take science classes or by having scientists create diagrams/mind maps to help them learn. As Lehrer wrote, “It’s time for the dialogue between our two cultures to become a standard part of the scientific method.” ” I used a quote from Jonah Lehrer to support one of my claims, instead of using a claim to support the evidence.

Learning Outcome 4: I have learned a lot about peer reviewing this semester. I’ve always found myself correcting grammar/sentence structure instead of looking at the bigger picture, but I think I improved on that throughout this class. For example, on a peer’s paper this semester I commented “I think you could tie this back to your thesis and explain why this type of beauty makes it so hard to define”; I was suggesting a way to tie my peer’s claim back to their thesis and make their argument stronger overall. I would have not had enough practice, knowledge or perspective to make a comment like this in high school; this class improved my peer reviewing skills and therefore my review strategies for my own writing. On that same paper, I also commented “You could expand on this idea and have an entire paragraph about the beauty of kindness/selflessness that would flow well here.” which shows how I was thinking about the flow of the paper as a whole. I appreciate how much I have learned in this class, especially in helping improve my peers’ writing in addition to my own.

Learning Outcomes 5 and 6: I’ve always struggled with citing my sources in my writing. I often get confused about what kind of source I should be citing, and end up citing something incorrectly throughout my paper and bibliography. In high school, I relied on using the internet for citing my sources, and often used Easybib or some other website to essentially do it for me. This semester, I had to work a lot on how to correctly cite my sources, and I think I did improve. I used resources like The Little Seagull and They Say/I Say to make sure I was doing it right. These sources helped me greatly, and I plan to keep using them for papers in my future classes. In my Significant Writing Project, I used in-text citations to cite quotes or ideas; for example, I wrote “He wrote “artists (painters) are in some sense neurologists, studying the brain with techniques that are unique to them” (3) ” to cite the page the quote was from in Lehrer’s writing.