7R

Blog 7R

                Throughout the past few classes, we have been focusing on polishing our autobiographical essays which have been very beneficial to me. More peer review helped me to definitely recognize that my thesis was not specific enough to my memory and I also had the chance to re-read my essay in class to look at sentence structure and transitions. These two lead me to change a lot of my sentences to include more variety and further make my sentences clearer and flow nicely. I went paragraph by paragraph and specifically focused only on the topic and ending sentences to make sure they supported each other as well as supported the thesis. Also in this workshop, I once again could see that I still need additional practice on writing an effective and strong thesis and I think most of my classmates would agree with this themselves. Hopefully by the end of the semester I will finally become proficient at this skill! I was also refreshed when went over the correct use of the semi-colon. Having heavy practice in rhetoric class senior year, I was once very good at knowing all of the grammar rules, but have since become a bit rusty. Another helpful work shopping tool was discussing how to avoid run on sentences and making sure the subject “I” did not begin every sentence.

                On Thursday, we were introduced to a new kind of writing known as Observational Writing. I am familiar with this type of writing and have already completed a paper in Anthropology which uses this strategy of using your five senses and creating vivid scene for the reader. The activity held in class was to observe the classroom and describe it, then observe the tabletop podium and describe that. It was definitely much easier to describe the classroom because there was more to look at, but describing the podium lead to much abstract thinking and really made me pay attention to detail. Further, we wrote a thesis statement to make an argument about one of these which was challenging, but I certainly liked the practice. We also read two observational pieces in our book and discussed them in class this week. I have always known that annotating my readings have helped me in the past and this week just supported this. The class discussed in small groups different analysis assumptions which pushed us to investigate what we read and answer questions having to do with if we thought Mr. Yeganeh is a bully or if his actions are justifiable and also assumptions about customer service. I liked this activity in that it took apart the story and I could use some work in recognizing these assumptions or themes in the pieces that we read to formulate more meaning to them. From a writing standpoint, it is a somewhat new form of writing for me, so I am curious to see how effective my observations of a person, place, or thing will come across in my writing.