When it comes to looking at writing as a recursive process, it is nice to think of it as a constant flow of growth and change. Writing is not a process that should be done at one time and to never be looked at or revised again. It is a craft that, for some, never ends. For some writers there is never a final, done-deal, sort of piece. As a young student, it is a bit of a shift to begin looking at papers with the mindset that paper structure is less solid than what I’ve been previously taught. Specifically when it comes to organization of my thoughts and ideas in writing assignments I have always been taught to stick to set format and structure for how I should convey these ideas to the reader of my paper. It is a very precise and neat way to approach writing, yet it is a messy and dirty process. Recursive writing allows me to really change things around as I see fit after writing the first draft of my paper, because sometimes the first draft is the piece of the writing process where my ideas and my organization get the messiest. After that initial draft, it is easier for me as a writer to delve back into my writing and to see how the ideas flow together, if they do at all, and how I can change them and their placement in the paper in order for it to make more sense to the reader.
When it comes to my papers, as a writer I struggle a lot with the amount of summary I put into my paper. This was a very clear issue when it came to my first paper I wrote for this class. I put in way too much summary for what was called for in order to introduce the reader to materials I was going to be using in order to prove my points. That is one aspect of my writing process that I am trying to change because it can lead to a very repetitive and boring paper, and one that will drag out my ideas. Too much summary can also prove to be a problem if I do not take into consideration who my audience is, especially if I am summarizing a piece that my audience is already familiar with. Summary is not a way of conveying my own ideas in the text, and the point of the paper is not to rewrite another’s work, so personally, this is an aspect of writing I need to work more on. As for incorporating quotes and such, I generally don’t have too much trouble fitting them into my work in a manner that isn’t too choppy. In terms of analysis of materials being used and sourced in my paper, applying the meaning of the text is not one that usually struggle with too much, it is generally pretty easy for me to incorporate the sources ideas to those of my own, without trying to take credit for their ideas as my own. In the paper, I looked for, and did my best to fix, the areas where my ideas and their ideas get muddled together.
While I read materials or essays that will later be used for another writing assignment or essay, I often go through the piece and read it thoroughly, making small comments as I go. Typically they resemble little asterisk or maybe an underlined sentence or two, if it is a bigger portion of text I will draw a bracket around the area, anything that’ll catch my eye again later. Once I read through it at first, I read through it a second time and go back to the places that I marked or noticed before, and begin to think about why they caught my eye. From there I write out what they made me think of, or how they connect to possible prompt, or point I am trying to make with this text. As I begin to look at these snippets of the text, I begin to form an argument or claim which ties back to my thesis, and it also connects to the textual evidence I found when I read through the piece. The active reading strategies really help me as a writer be able to form solid ideas and claim which prove my points with a stable basis. It creates a strong ground, which allows me as a writer to tie them into my piece with a more fluid manner and one which will make more sense to the reader of my work.
Being able to criticize others work at a global level before a local level is not something that is totally foreign to me, we had a lot of instruction to do this style of editing while I was in high school. I’ve been taught that while the local edits are useful and good to have, that they are not the most important aspects of the paper. Overall the paper is meant to convey the ideas of the writer, which is the important aspects to focus on as an editor. If the editor, or reader, cannot understand what the writer is talking about in terms of the bigger picture and main ideas, there is a fair chance that another reader will run into the same issue. So as a peer editor making these global edits are a good idea since it is important to give the writer a chance to fix these ideas where they might be making less sense to a reader, or where they may lose their focus on what the issue they’re discussing is. Assessing this issue early on in the writing process gives the writer a chance to hone in on what they are trying to say in a more concise manner that sounds well put and knowledgeable, instead of coming across as unorganized and sloppy. Often times as well, as the writer fixes and works on these global edits, the changes or corrections with the local edits will be made as they go along.
MLA format is something I always think I know how to do, yet when it comes down to it, I have a lot of trouble actually getting it right. When it comes to citing work in papers, parenthetical or otherwise, I tend to be alright with that, but when it comes to having the bigger citations at the end of the paper, I tend to mess up what information is supposed to be there and what is not. My biggest issue is knowing the proper information about what sources I am using, and from there the proper way to cite them within the citation. This is an issue that I can resolve with a little bit of study and research on my own and maybe with a little bit of help from my peers or teachers.
One of my biggest issues that falls under the umbrella of local edits, would be my overuse of run-on sentences in my work. I often get distracted with different ideas while I am writing, so many times I will write and there will many ideas in one sentence. It will start out going after one idea I have, and the sentence will end on an entirely different idea, yet both will be described, just within the same sentence. They can be very tedious and long when it comes to reading them and it can also be detrimental to the amount of attention that the reader puts towards reading my work. I’m sure that I have done it numerous times throughout this paragraph, or assignment. It is a grammatical issue that I am constantly looking for in my work since it can have a large impact on how others read my papers. There are other grammatical errors that I have to go through my work and fix because they too make a difference in how people read it. I think that continuing to learn more about how to keep these issues out of my writing is a very important skill because it allows for my work to sound a lot more put together and to be more concise and to the point.
