Outcome 6 (Surface Error) – Control sentence-level error (grammar, punctuation, spelling)
In my first paper, Breaking Down Boxes, I had some issues with introducing my sources and often exposed the reader to too much information and confused them before delivering my citations. In the next paper I should work on having a smoother introduction to my sources and the overall flow of the paper. One issue I noted in my dear reader was my tendency to go off on tangents. When my paper was being edited I only received criticism on one section that it occurred. I would definitely consider that an improvement, but I can still do better for the next one. A noteworthy success was my use of caveats throughout the paper. I included personal misgivings and expressed a distrust in myself as a narrator in order to help the reader understand where I was coming from as the author. This will definitely be included in upcoming works.
In my second paper, I had three key errors in my local revisions that were not found before I submitted my paper. The first problem was the closing sentence in my first paragraph, which wasn’t actually a sentence, “In simpler terms, the wish to be oneself without discrimination,” (Gould 1). The edit I would have made for this should have been to insert, “it is” before “the wish to be…” The second and third corrections in my paper should have occurred in the 3rd to last sentence in the first paragraph on page number 3 and halfway through my closing paragraph. I chose not to include a comma in both local revisions and it made the flow of reading difficult to understand without it.
As I finally wrap up my first semester of college and the course of English 110 I find myself becoming more and more proficient at controlling my thoughts. I originally mentioned to my professor Carole Center that I often struggle to maintain a clear train of thought and tend to ramble on ad infinitum on unrelated tangents. I finally feel as though after the last three paper assignments that I have successfully stifled that bad habit. In my podcast revision of my third paper I needed to take a considerable amount of time to edit it down from the unnecessary portions, and I believe that this is a direct result of having a strong consistent argument throughout the entire narrative.
