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blog responses

Nikki:

My first thought is “wow, long paragraphs.” Nikki definitely improved over time in breaking up her paragraphs—though some are still long. I think her development as a writer is most obvious in her memoir drafts. By breaking up the paragraphs, changing the order of ideas, and adding more of herself, Nikki created a much more coherent paper. I really enjoy her voice, but sometimes when she is writing in the purely academic context, she loses that voice in sometimes unorganized thoughts. I think she has improved on that a lot.

Melanie:

I think Melanie developed as a writer greatly by experimenting with paper organization. There were quite a few changes between drafts that changed the ordering of paragraphs and ideas. Overall I feel like this helped me to understand her ideas and follow her thought processes. I also think she seems more confident in her writing.

Rachel:

In her papers Rachel uses a lot of quotations and examples from her own life. She improved greatly in using those examples to support her original thoughts. At the beginning it seemed as though they didn’t really fit into the paper and were kind of thrown in from left field, but throughout the semester she began to incorporate all of her ideas together in a more effective way.

Myself:

I’m not really sure how much I improved over the semester. I’m actually kind of unhappy about the end products I turned in. I feel like for most of my first drafts I had clear ideas except that they were missing or ignoring important aspects of my arguments. When I tried to explore those aspects, I think it just left my papers feeling incomplete and under-developed. I think my memoir improved a lot. With every draft it was a completely different paper, and I think the end product definitely contained more narrative and substance than the first couple of drafts.