what I learned this week pt.8

Not going to lie, this week started off rough for me. I had some personal things going on and then coming to class and being really confused by WP3 made me even more frustrated. I’m the type of person that likes to follow exact directions and play by the rules, so it tends to be difficult for me to follow such “loose” directions. As a math and science person, I also find it hard for me to be creative at times, especially when it comes to thinking “out of the box” in a writing aspect. That being said, you can imagine how I was feeling when I started to brainstorm ideas for the WP3. I decided to take a step back and read through some articles. Doing this allowed me to find something I found interesting and let it kind of give me ideas. Rather than thinking of a genre for younger and older people and then making the article transform to those genres, I read the article and used the information presented to think of genres that would best fit. This helped a lot and made it so much easier to get my ideas. After coming to class on Wednesday, (as usual) writing project 3 became much more clear to me. After becoming more clear, it gained my interest and made me much more excited to write it. Although our class didn’t have the exact same instructions as the samples did, seeing the samples helped tremendously and solidified my understanding of the assignment. This week I was definitely challenged by the project but am thankful for that because it’s only going to help me grow as a writer and student.

PB3A

        For the WP3, the scholarly article I chose is “Teaching Punctuation as a Rhetorical Tool” by John Dawkins. The article thoroughly describes the rules and regulations and the value and significance of punctuation in writing. Dawkins further explains the flexibility that punctuation allows and the hierarchy of functional punctuation marks. Similar to how genres and rhetorical conventions change based on an intended audience, punctuation changes based on how you want to present your ideas/information. For example, one could write “Today John went to school.” Another way this could be written is, “Today, John went to school.” That being said, in the second example, the author would be choosing to add the comma, placing a pause after the word “today.” Although the sentences don’t differ much, there is a difference in the way the information was presented. Adding the comma affects the flow of the sentence and how one would read the sentence. Like I mentioned before, Dawkins explains the flexibility that punctuation allows and the way each writer chooses to use a specific punctuation mark is entirely based on how they want readers to perceive it.

        To turn this material presented in this scholarly article into a genre for children, I will make it into a song. Using the rules and regulations presented, I will give my best efforts in creating rhymes and patterns within the song that I think would catch the attention of a child. I will attempt to simplify the hearty details and information given to be better understood by the mind of a child, as they are not used to digesting advanced language and concepts. I will have a chorus, as most songs do. Although I’m not entirely sure if this will work out the way I want it to, I’m hopeful that my lyrics will start to flow once I get into it. Do you know of anything that could strengthen this part?? If so, please comment!

       To turn this scholarly article into a genre for adults, I will make a teacher’s lesson plan. Specifically, in this lesson plan I will focus on Dawkin’s “Hierarchy of Functional Punctuation Marks.” As I don’t have any prior experience with writing lesson plans, I did my fair amount of research and decided that I will stick with a fairly simple lesson plan following a very basic format. It will be separated into columns, the first one being learning context. The learning context would be “an intermediate level writing course; a unit on effective grammar and punctuation”. The next column would be learning goal. The learning goal would be “by the end of the lesson, students will be able to recognize and employ multiple uses of punctuation marks”. The next column would be development. In this column I would write don that I would be giving a handout to all students with the basic rules and examples of how to use each punctuation mark. I will actually make the worksheet and attach it to the lesson plan. This part will be the most effective in helping myself learn/touch up the specific rules associated with the punctuation marks and their uses. The next column will be activity. In this column I would again write down that I will be handing out another worksheet. This worksheet is an assignment for students to practice using the punctuation, rather than just reading about it from the previous worksheet. This one will consist of a few different types of questions, testing their grasp on the subject. I will also provide a key with the answers and explanations for that. For student interaction I would call on volunteers to read off answers, and reward them with candy.

       Although this took a lot of out of the box thinking, I am feeling more and more confident (which always happen the more we discuss the writing project) and am excited to see the final outcome of my paper. Planning it all out this way and writing about it seemed useless to me at first but I realized that this is going to make writing the actual WP3 so so much easier.

what I learned this week pt.7

Week 7 down, only 3 more to go. I feel like every week I talk about how quickly time is going, but it never ceases to amaze me. Although we only met once during week 7, I thought our time together was extremely beneficial. Starting with the journal 7.2, right off the bat I was able to dive into my own paper and see what it was that I did differently from writing project 1 and how it worked out, better or worse. In my case, I took Zack’s advice from my WP1 and changed the organizational structure of my paper. Instead of writing about source #1, source #2, and source #3 in separate paragraphs, my WP2 unfolded in a more integrated/interwoven way like: idea #1 (and then incorporated sources 1, 2, 3), idea #2 (and then incorporated sources 1, 2, 3), idea #3 (and then incorporated sources 1, 2, 3). This helped hugely with the flow of my paper and made it much more reader friendly and easy to follow. Next, I enjoyed the socrative activity, as it was something that I had never done before. I thought it was very cool and almost had my intro discussed because I was in the top 4. Go me! Last but not least, the peer editing session was also extremely helpful. Its always nice to get outside ideas on how to better your paper because many of the things I had pointed out to me, I would’ve never thought about. I think this peer review session was more helpful than the last, purely due to the increased amount of time we had. Overall, I didn’t have anything critical to change about my paper and left feeling confident about it, only having a few small things to critique. After the last peer review, I left feeling very unconfident with my paper and I ended up not doing as well as I would’ve liked, so I’m interested to see if my confidence towards this paper will get me a better grade!