Exploratory Essay Self-Assessment Reflection

1.) My goals for myself in writing this paper were:
**** to effectively eliminate my own voice and opinion in the paper and try to give voice to my beliefs in terms of the connections I was able to make between the readings
****to reference the readings properly since I have documented difficulty doing that
****to plan this paper using an outline because I hardly ever plan when I write
****to try to use the workshopping in class to improve my paper's content beyond grammar
I think I effectively accomplished the first three goals I mentioned, and each presented it's own challenges.  I had to work very hard to not give my opinion on a paper like this that seems to beg for opinions.  I simply had to work to find passages that illustrated how the authors felt about something rather than focus on stating what I felt or believed.  I don't know that I've ever written an essay quite like this and I'm not a little nervous that I've written off topic. 
I do think I did a fairly decent job of referencing these articles; I found original texts in several cases so that page numbers were as accurate as possible. 
I also wrote an outline for the first time in a very very long time--I probably have only done that when it's been mandatory for an assignment.  I don't like to plan--it's simply not how I write. And I don't think not planning has never really gotten me into very much trouble on an assignment.  Even so, my difficulty in understanding this particular assignment told me that I probably needed to do something different--so I wrote out several ideas and outlines based on topics I could write effectively and selected the best-sounding plan to use for my essay.  That outline seemed to help me write the essay a lot quicker; I just had to flesh out bits of my argument rather than craft it wholly on the fly. 
Unfortunately, I really didn't get a lot out of the workshopping exercise.  I don't know that people had a lot of time to consider my paper after I read it aloud, so I don't think they were able to give me enough feedback beyond that of revising my run-on sentences.  We should stretch the workshop out over a longer period of time, maybe two class periods or something, or just not read papers aloud.

2.)  For the first time in a long time, I used my time to build not just one, but several outlines based on connections I'd seen between the readings.  Then I read them over and picked out the one I thought I could support the best with quotations.  I then began to fill out the arguments and search the texts for exact quotes.  I spent the majority of my time on searching for references and attempting to get the citations right.  I didn't really use a lot of classtime to write the paper; the workshopping helped me notice grammatical mistakes, not a lot else.  I mostly got praise from my group members and that was great, don't get me wrong. I just think I would've gotten more out of the workshop if we'd had more time in class to respond and didn't feel so rushed.  All in all, I think my use of time fit my goals, particularly that of citing references properly.  But I would like to my group members give me more feedback about content as opposed to syntax issues.

3.) I did see an improvement in my writing in terms of my tendency to use run-on sentences.  I got some good feedback from my group members on how I could break up those sentences to make things clearer, and I amended my paper based on their suggestions.  I also made notes on where they thought I could ask more questions about the readings or reorganize my paper to integrate those "questions I was left with" into the body of the paper.  I think I interacted well with my group members and gave them some good feedback as well.  Everyone seemed to read my paper and rethink their own paper in some way, so overall, I think it was a helpful workshopping exercise for all of us.

4.) I think each of my group members contributed to the betterment of my paper.  Joey helped me think about the run-on sentences and gave me some suggestions on how to break up long sentences.  Lynnsey did the same and raised questions about how I organized the paper so that I might think of more questions to ask of the authors and make more connections between the readings.  Josh gave me some very high praise, which did a great deal to assuage my concerns over writing off-topic. 

5.) I've learned that, although I have a lot more experience as a writer than most of the others in class, I still have a long way to go to improve my writing.  I think I can learn a lot from the other students, especially in regards to clarity in my wiritng--I think I know what I'm talking about and I do it well, but they're good judges of just how well I'm really making my point.  I am glad to have people giving honest opinions about my writing that aren't the instructor--and I look forward to people getting comfortable enough with my writing to really critique it hard.  That will hopefully come with time as we get more comfortable with each other and get to know each other's styles better. 

6.) As I said before, the hardest parts were trying to write on-topic and cite sources properly.  I found the assignment a bit ambiguous and I know Megan was doing that intentionally to avoid steering us in a particular direction.  Sometimes you just have to figure it out for yourself, and I really hope I interpreted the assignment correctly.  I'm not 100% certain I did just that--but I did think I avoided giving my opinion in the paper, and as difficult as it was to write this assignment, I think that was the easiest of the tasks to do. 
Citing references and paraphrasing have always been difficult tasks for me, and I worked hard to apply MLA citation guidelines and find the original sources so citations would be super-accurate should someone go looking at the sources.  I just think practicing citing sources using examples in class would be a good use of our class time, since it's such a big deal in academic circles.  I can tell you from experience that doing it incorrectly can have some pretty epic consequences and I'd hate to see people get busted for messing up something like that.
I'd say that I took risks in my paper by picking a very specific topic to discuss rather than a broad issue. Everyone else in my group went with a broad topic and I think they made a good effort of it.  I just found that I couldn't do that without giving my opinion too much to meet the conditions of the assignment as I understood them.  This may have been the complete wrong direction in which to travel--but the assignment left a lot of wiggle room and I thought I would do a better job on the paper by keeping the ideas simple and small.  Too bad my sentences are never simple and small! Guess nobody's perfect...

7.) I think I am most proud of the organization of my paper and how I chose to leave my most interesting question for the end.  I also attempted to do the letter format in the beginning, but that just didn't seem to fit with the aim of the paper in the end.  Since I started off and spent a lot of time talking about how these readings were the same, I wanted to give a little space to how they're different.  Megan explained about the "conversation" these authors are having and the whole point of the paper was to show how they're agreeing with each other--but people rarely agree all the time, and hardly ever when they're talking about a big issue.  I felt it was only appropriate to consider the differences and I think the questions I posed did a good job of that.  I know my choice to do that made my group members reconsider the organization of their own papers, so that is a compliment in itself, really.  I just hope I wrote effectively and didn't go off-assignment--if I did, I at least went all the way with it.

8.) I still think I need improvement with the quotations I used and the choice of connections I selected.  I couldn't get some readings to work for all comparisons, like Kaplan's for example, that I used in only one instance of comparison.  I probably need to go back and try to add in comparisons using that piece, but I found it difficult to do so and so I left it in only one place.  I also attempted to clarify my run-on sentences with the help of my group members' suggestions, and I split up several long, wordy sentences into smaller ones.  At Lynnsey's suggestion, I tried to ask more questions of the papers and integrate those questions into the body paragraphs as opposed to leaving all the questions to the end.

9.)  I said before that I wrote multiple outlines based on connections I had observed between readings and wrote out quotes I remembered that might support them.  I then read through these outlines and selected the one I thought I could flesh out the best.  I then sat down and filled in the argument and focused my "questions" towards the end of the paper.  In the beginning, I attempted to write it in letter form, but after reading the finished rough draft, I went back and edited those parts out.  I then tried to build a Works Cited page based on MLA format and found it difficult to cite the readings from the information readily available to me.  I used placeholders for in-line citations and some of the references and I asked Megan in class before the workshop about suggestions for getting reference information.  During workshopping, I took notes on my group member's suggestions and wrote them on my own hard copy, and I kept their corrected hard copies to see where I needed to correct run-on sentences.  I then edited my paper based on their suggestions for run-on sentences, and I integrated some additional "questions" into the body paragraphs.  Next, I did searches online for original sources of the readings and downloaded the Purdue OWL Reference Style Chart.  I used the chart to modify my placeholder Works Cited and in-line citations to reflect MLA style and the original source page numbers.  I then read the paper one last time and performed a spelling and grammar check in Microsoft Word to correct any obvious mistakes, finally submitting the finished piece to the forum for commentary.