Outcome 1: My second paper had the most and best revisions of any of my papers because it was the one I got the most legitimate feedback from. As good as our class is at writing our own papers, I noticed that valuable constrictive criticism towards other people’s papers was usually lacking in anything truly substantial. Personally, I too felt that my critiques of other people were lacking, but I didn’t why because I haven’t developed an eye for it yet. My second paper was teacher reviewed and because our teacher has years of experience critiquing papers, I felt that her critiques allowed me to revise and refine a lot more of my paper compared to the other two. The two biggest pieces revision I went through was the introductory paragraph and the closing paragraph. My original introductory paragraph about the history of social activism and how current day activism can’t promote real change anymore was a good start, but it lacked any sort of examples that could compliment my assertion. As such the original paragraph felt lacking in substance because of it. To fix this I added a sentence about the occupy Wall Street movement and why it failed. However, I felt the introduction now was a bit bulky and long, so I reworked a couple of the sentences in the beginning of the intro to be shorter and more to the point which helped the flow of the introduction a lot as it now felt like it was getting to my ideas faster while also giving a little support behind them.

            The two theses I drew from in this essay to draw from where from Roxane Gay who a civil rights activist is, and Kenji Yoshino someone who imagines a new future of civil rights activism. Throughout my essay the revelations of Gay and her disillusionment lean help support the ideas of Yoshino. Because of this I felt it fitting to make a conclusion about how Gay might view Yoshino’s ideas of a new civil rights movement that seeks to fix some of the problems with the current one she is in. I gave a lot of credence to the fact that Yoshino’s new civil rights has a lot of flaws in it that Gay might not like which gave me the conclusion that she wouldn’t agree with Yoshino’s ideas. However, there was a key piece of Yoshino’s argument about the need for current civil rights as well that I failed to represent. I rewrote the paragraph to account for this and instead concluded that Gay would take a more neutral stance on Yoshino’s ideas which sets an ending tone that’s less contradictory to the ideas of the paper. Overall, I think those two revisions are the ones that stuck with me the most and have given me a stronger understanding of what to look out for in both my introductions and my conclusions.

            Outcome 2: Thinking back to my time in high school English classes I remember distinctly how the papers I wrote were rather disjointed between the ideas of the essays or novels I was using for the essay and my own ideas. Specifically the fact that I was less constructing an  essay that was a conversation between the authors ideas and my own, and more that I was spewing the authors ideas out all over the first couple paragraphs after the intro and then using one or two paragraphs to present my own ideas. I cringe whenever I read my old high school papers because I know it was the wrong way to write an engaging essay at the time, but I did it because it wasn’t as penalized as it probably should have been by my teachers. Fast forward to now and I finally have written a paper where I can say it’s an actual conversation between ideas.

The Gay and Yoshino paper when I reread it shows how much my skills have grown. The paper isn’t divided into two blocks of someone else’s ideas then my ideas like my older papers. Instead I took the initiative and presented some of my ideas first after the introduction rather than Gay’s or Yoshino’s. I think that really set the tone that this was MY essay and not an essay about other people. After I gave my own example on civil rights of the 50’s, how they expanded self-expression, and why it’s different today I followed it up with two paragraphs on Yoshino’s ideas on new civil rights. The first paragraph held a lot of the meat of Yoshino’s ideas while the second paragraph bounced back and forth from Yoshino’s ideas to my thoughts on Yoshino’s ideas which created the sense that Yoshino’s ideas where actually being engaged with properly in the essay. Gay’s ideas had a similar structure to them although I felt that I could have done a somewhat better job of relating her ideas to my own. The conclusion where all the ideas of the essay coalesced together is where I think the essay shines best due to the fact that it bounces from my thoughts to Yoshino’s thoughts to Gay’s thoughts while keeping a coherent structure, at least in my opinion. I’m really proud of the fact that I was able to write an essay with good text to text connections and I think it’s the writing skill I have that has developed the most from high school.

Outcome 5: Personally, I find that this signal phrasing and proper use of quotes is still the skill that I am worse at. I have improved from my time in high school where I would just have sentences containing nothing, but a quotation or one that started with a quotation. However, I still find it difficult to know how to properly transition from ideas in a sentence to a quotation or vice versa. My Gay and Yoshino essay I think is very much a mixed bag in terms of proper signal phrasing. There are a couple sentences that are “Yoshino explains that…” then a quote followed by an idea which ruins some of the flow to the paragraph and is basically the equivalent to starting a paragraph with a quote. However later there are a couple uses of quotation that I think flow naturally in the sentence and explains the authors thoughts well which lets me know that I have improved somewhat. Overall, this is the skill I need to work on the most.

Outcome 6: I really love commas. Almost too much. I think when I went from middle school English to high school English I must have read a novel or essay that had a lot of commas in them and I made a connection in my mind that more commas equals a more sophisticated paper without realizing the purpose of a comma. As such my high school papers are littered with them. Splicing commas everywhere I could put them. Now I need to consciously try to stop myself from using commas all the time. This does slow down my writing process a bit as I need to restructure sentences constantly to get rid of splicing commas, but its worth it for a proper essay. My second essay isn’t particularly noteworthy about comma use because I have no doubt there are some areas that have improper comma use as well. However, I still believe that I have made a solid change to my comma use since high school although I still have some work to do. No doubt these writing outcomes evaluations have improper comma use in some places as well.