Hello and thank you for taking the time to take a look at my work,

Over the past semester I have undergone more growth as a communicator than over any period in my academic life. I came into this course thinking I knew the best way to write, proofread, and present my work. I did not. As an instructor, I’m sure that is unsurprising for you to hear. For me, it was a bit of a shock. I considered myself an extremely capable writer and even more so a communicator.

I used to write all my works at once. I would wait until I felt ready and churn out a whole piece. My revision process consisted of me checking for typos and making sure I said what I wanted to say and then that was the end of that. That method worked for me. My papers were not groundbreaking stuff, but they were good and they were graded well. It wasn’t until we did the deep revision of one of our papers in class on our “Analyzing Rhetorical Arguments” assignment that I saw how flawed the way I wrote was.  My sentence structure was good, as was my paper structure, but my paragraph structure was nonexistent. I treated paragraphs as big boxes for ideas, rather than an individual argument with a purpose. I wrote big five page long papers with as few as four body paragraphs. This never struck me as strange until I saw the correct way. Now I make sure I have strong topic sentences at the beginning of all of my paragraphs and there are a lot more paragraphs in my papers. They flow much better and my argument sounds stronger than ever.

The exploratory phase of my writing has gotten a lot shorter now that I don’t have to write a whole piece at once. I now can begin to write what I have as soon as I have it and rework it later. The writing now takes just as much time, but upon the completion of each page comes a period where I put my writing under a microscope and ensure it is well structured and positioned well within my paper. Unfortunately not all of my bad habits have gone away. I still hate getting feedback on my work. I tend to reject changes in peer review because I’m unable to view what I’m writing as an outsider. When a suggestion is made to me I can’t help but revert to my initial thought process when writing it. On average, I only make roughly 20% of changes suggested by my classmates, friends, and family. This number is far too low and continues to be my biggest obstacle as a writer. When I do take advice, it works out for the better. While undergoing this process with my girlfriend on my paper “Fear as an Argument”, I had the first page of my paper go from this:

In his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Nicholas Carr (you should generally use the name first, then the pronoun. so the reader doesn’t have to look back) uses fear to make the reader concerned with how we (possibly informal, you may want to change “we” to people or something like that) consume information in the digital age. This tactic was (may not want to go past-tense; you could use “is” instead of “was” to show that it is still still effective) incredibly effective as the article has become very popular since its publishing.Eliciting fear is an effective way to grab people’s attention. When Carr chose the title “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” for his article, he most certainly had this (may be unclear to reader what “this” is referring to) in mind. Regardless of article’s content, suggesting we all are getting (maybe it’s just me but I think “getting” is more colloquial) stupid is going to make people interested. Further evidence that fear was (“is” to make it in the present, maybe) Carr’s primary motivator for selecting that (“this”) title comes from the work as a whole. After reading the article, the reader may notice that Carr didn’t (didn’t -> did not) argue that Google or the internet as a whole was (is) making us “stupid” per say, but rather that we were slowly exchanging depth of knowledge for a broader knowledge base. The title, (comma here? don’t remember.) “Is the Internet Increasing Our Breadth of Knowledge at the Expense of Depth?” isn’t (isn’t -> is not) nearly as catchy, nor is it as intriguing.

to this:

In Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, he uses fear to make the reader concerned with how we consume information in the digital age. This tactic is incredibly effective as the article has become very popular since its publishing. Eliciting fear is an effective way to grab people’s attention. When Carr chose the title “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” for his article, he most certainly had this in mind. Regardless of article’s content, suggesting we all are getting stupid is going to make people interested. Further evidence that fear is Carr’s primary motivator for selecting this title comes from the work as a whole. After reading the article, the reader may notice that Carr did not argue that Google or the internet as a whole is making us “stupid” per say, but rather that we were slowly exchanging depth of knowledge for a broader knowledge base. The title “Is the Internet Increasing Our Breadth of Knowledge at the Expense of Depth?” is not nearly as catchy, nor is it as intriguing.

Seeing all of the parentheses of editing genuinely made me a little angry at first, and I could tell my girlfriend was losing patience with how dismissive I was of her criticism, but after actually making a number of changes, I was left with a far better final product. The inclusion of others in proofreading isn’t something I like, but it’s a pill that I’m nearly able to swallow.I still have much to learn as a writer and as a presenter. This semester, I underwent a growth and expansion of my abilities that I didn’t previously consider possible. A slow, methodical approach to examining my work, rather than having someone look at it and tell me it’s broken has been incredibly important to me and my writing is still far from perfect, but I now feel like I know where to go and what I can fix. That’s more than I could say five months ago.

Thanks,

Kellen Schmitz