Shelby Koonts Working Together and Finding a Process Before this class I had only taken one other

writing class throughout high school. I was never bad at writing I just never learned any formal ways to do it or the process of writing. Some things Im good at when it comes to writing is sensory detail and making the stories come alive and knowing exactly what Im going to say once I decide what to write about. Organizational skills are where I was lacking. Usually I would just start writing the paper without putting much thought or consideration into the organizational part. Throughout this semester I have learned that Im the type of person who needs a process or anything I write will be (bad). Throughout this paper I will show you what kind of processes I tried and which ones worked best for me. The first paper the class was assigned was the literacy narrative. When I begin to try to write that paper I still wasnt very sure what any of my literacys were. The class had to write down all the book they read as a child to spark some memories, mine were, Captain Underpants, The Foot Book , Junie B. Jones, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid, As you can see those arent very intellectual books so that didnt help at all. We ended up doing a draft proposal and after thinking for like 10 minutes I finally thought about softball my draft proposal was really vague all it said was I thought that id do mine about softball. After the draft proposal we did all these different types of thought maps and other process pieces but I chose to do a bubble map. In the first Bubble I put softball and every bubble around it was something that I learned from softball and that was really helpful in deciding specifically what my paper was going to be about. I felt like my first draft was perfect and then we had to do revisions. Now in my mind revisions are going through the paper and fixing any grammar errors and little things like that. Well for this paper I felt like I had

to rewrite the whole thing. Seeing how different a paper with the same topic could be was kind of cool but I hated the revised version. I felt like it left out a lot of important events in my life and the reader wouldnt be able to understand me but I lived with it. For paper two, the persuasive essay, the subject of the paper was much more simple, and easy to understand because it was basically chosen for me. I knew exactly what I was going to write about and although I had only done one research paper before, that wasnt the part I had trouble with. Organization was killing me, because of the fact that a lot of it was statistics and numbers it had to be in order or else it wouldnt make sense and I didnt know how to put it in order very well. My strategy was just start writing and hope for the best. I had never tried an outline before but we had to do one in class. Mine was very amateur you could really tell I hadnt done one before but it helped start to see what my paper was going to be and look like. This is the outline I made. I. Introduction II. General interest A. Why should I consider this job? III. Personal skill A. Interests IV. Average Pay A. Full Time B. Part time V. Amount of Jobs VI. Conclusion After I did this the paper seemed much simpler. I still had trouble with the research because I could only find two sites that I liked and the library didnt have any books I could use. I ended

up adding some things to the outline but I didnt write them down that was just in my head. It was a pretty successful paper and I liked the fact that it was informal. Before writing this I had really no clue what amount of school I would need for dental hygiene or what I would get paid once I was finished with school, really anything that related to that. So this paper was actually very helpful for me. For essay 3 we had a decision about what type of essay our paper would be. It could either be cause and effect or compare and contrast. Before I read anything about the two types of essays I was leaning toward compare and contrast. After I read about them I was definitely not doing that and I picked cause and effect. I had no idea what it was though because I had never done one before, so I knew this one was going to be hard for me. In class One day we had to take example essay and pick them apart with our group and find the outline. That really helped me to see what a case and effect outline should look like. There were two ways of doing it, Option one was, CauseEffectEffect Effect, while option two was EffectCauseCauseCause. I chose option two. My paper was titled Causes of Dental Fear and the outline had the intro where I told the reader what the paper was about and it also was the effect then I had three different causes and a conclusion. The outline was a little less helpful than it was in the second essay only because the causes didnt have to be in a certain order to make sense. But it did help with the research aspect because I knew what to research and when to do it and that was a time saver. Im glad I wrote this paper because maybe it could help somebody who happens to read it, but it didnt help with anything in my life. Ive never been afraid of going to the dentist. Along with leraning how to do outlines one of the most helpful things I did in this class was peer work shop. I had never done this before and I did not want to at all. But I didnt wnt to get points

taken off for not showing up for it so I came. And I am glad I did because I think my grade wouldve been worse if I hadnt.I hope that some of my teacher have use do this in the furture. I am really glad that we did the peer workshop but mostly Im happy I learned this new outline technique because it really works well for me. I dont know how I wouldve gotten the second paper done without it. Throughout the rest of my college career I will probably use this process for every paper I end up doing because its so helpful and visual and for people like me who are visual learners, outlines are the best things to have. Also im glad I took this enlish class because even though I took a wrtiting class before, it was more of grammar and sentence structure. This class how ever introduced me to different types of papers wich are narratives persuasive and cause and effect. AlsoI learned different styles of writing because believer it or not I had never heard of APA or MLA before and I have never done a works cited page or any type of citing within my papers. Overall this was a succefull class for me.