Midterm - Reflection

Dillon Waugh

Hayes

English 100 – 9:10

3/15/13

Word Count:  787

Midterm: Reflection

To “read like a writer” is to read with attention to aspects of a writer’s technique and their effects for assimilation or addition into one’s own style. This is a thing I’ve tried to do since high school at the very least, but never so much into rhetorical or journalistic writing – although in class, I’ve paid less attention to use of sentence craft than I have to tone. Intriguing as it is to me, I’d felt more pressure to keep my writing strait-laced in middle and high school. Now, meanwhile, we’ve been openly told to discard the No Personal Pronouns rule and encouraged to write an essay inspired by the silly Rock Lexicon, and toward Essay 2, my group read a piece that used the phrase “Sod all.” I feel freer to experiment with application of my voice, a bit more personality in writing; while I haven’t gone and don’t see myself going all-out with colloquialism, I did throw in a “for heaven’s sake” and such for-style extra phrases as “exactly” and “I suppose” in my Rock Lexicon follower.

Although I did have more fun with that essay, the process of writing Essay 2 wasn’t tedious, let alone as much as I was worried it may be. My group read and wrote on gap years; it seemed like a little of a prosaic topic, and it wasn’t one that I’d chose – the article I’d read in preparation for the project was about modern art. But even if it’s a bit of an unexciting thing to research conversation on, I found interpreting and comparing thoughts and opinions, even ones that are essentially in agreement, to be interesting. I suppose that that’s how it becomes interesting “relating oneself to the rest of the world”, even where areas outside of one’s zone of familiarity are concerned. While reading about a particular thing may not be stimulating, it can be intriguing to see someone else might find it to be or not be, and why, and what those reasons may mean and imply.

I do also think that I’m more confident in the results of the second than of the first. It may have been because I felt that the process of leading into why you think a thing from the thought itself is more intuitive than that of going from telling that you know something to posing an excuse to list some of that knowledge off – hence the importance of conceptualizing rhetorical and expository writing as “conversational”, I know. But what bothered me especially and with an odd, silly depth about my essay on zombies was the conclusion – I’ve always had some worries about writing conclusions that are in fact conclusive, and my Essay 1 had no conclusion whatsoever, unlike my Essay 2. The “champagne glass” model, I think, is an idea it would’ve helped me to have a long time ago. Not merely restating and reemphasizing the importance of a stance but re-relating it to a practical context is helpful. I still didn’t do it artfully, but to say plainly that an argument for or against gap years could have some importance on one’s formative years (I tried to do so by writing that my columnist of choice’s “harmony of perspectives may benefit [the outlook of an underachiever or skeptic whose good student wants a year off]”) is something.

The difference in the process of receiving and integrating points of feedback between essays had its own impact, I think – pairing off instead of receiving feedback from a professor who has many other essays to attend to, while of course it wouldn’t necessarily offer the same evenness, was interesting, offered perspective. My proofreader reported that my piece read logically but was verbose and dotted with cumbersome words enough to break its flow, as well as seconded my dissatisfaction with an incomplete ending. I turned back and streamlined it.

That was in the revision stage of the way I’ve always gone through with essay-writing procedure – while the usual seems to always be presented as reading-brainstorming-pre-writing-drafting-revision-editing-proofreading, as I do it, it always winds up reading-brainstorming-drafting-revision-proofreading-editing. I often brainstorm into the same document that I write in and complicate and articulate the results into a draft; this paragraph has replaced the line “Writing process formula – standard and own, proofreading before editing”. On that point, I normally proofread a closer-to-finalized draft and then edit it finely based on that – or maybe it would be more accurate to say that I proofread twice, one before and one after those edits. A final, sure proofread is of course always in order.

And in conclusion, silly me – I said that I’ve learned and yet I didn’t save the “Self and the World” response bit for the ending!