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Before coming to Cal and enrolling in college writing R1A I had no confidence in my writing skills, nor did I have a system or method to my writing. I used to make mental maps and notes about my essay in my head before writing them and then would just jump into it with no pre-writing or outlining but this proved to be very ineffective especially in college. I learned the importance of the pre-writing phase and then used that to bolster a strong outline which again proved to be pivotal in my writing development. I now use outlining to make the writing phase more fluid and effective with stronger themes and ideas. This class also ingrained the importance of revising and editing drafts of your essay before completing the final draft as this is something that I did not do a lot of before. Revising is now a set in stone process for any draft of writing I have and has elevated my writing to a higher level. I now believe that I have a strong base for my writing skills and am confident in them for the first time and think they will serve me well during my time at Cal, even though I still have more to learn.

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For the writing process of this critical review essay of the Decameron Project, I saw my writing come together in three main steps. The first was the pre-writing which I am not looking to focus on, but that step I used to start building ideas and thoughts about the essay and my opinions on if the project was a success or not. After which I went into my next two steps where I saw most of the changes in the construction of my essay working towards the final draft. The first of the two steps I used to gather what my overall viewpoint on the project was as a whole, and since this was a critical review piece I needed to pick a side. The picture to the left labeled #1 shows the first step, but in this case just for my introduction paragraph, and how I collected all my thoughts on the project into one area. This was very helpful for a writer like myself where during the early stages of the writing process my brain is bouncing all around the place thinking about too much at once, and this helped me to just focus on one paragraph at a time; I could see all of my ideas together in one place.  I then went into step two which was using what I did in the first step to start constructing my thesis and then eventually into my final introduction which would be the base for the body paragraphs and evidence that supported it to follow. The picture on the right labeled #2 is the final product of turning step one into more of a structured and coherent introductory paragraph. These two steps I took I applied to each of the five paragraphs in this essay and were crucial in the writing process to ensure I had all the necessary information in each paragraph, by helping me to organize my thoughts and ideas.

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I am a big believer in outlines when it comes to writing an essay because of the way they act as a way to get my point across without worrying about perfect grammar or sentence structure slowing down the development but I chose to take this even further for the Undocumented Americans essay. Ordinarily, I would have a general idea of where I wanted my essay to go and that is how I would start my outline and I would then try to fill in all the blanks based on that specific area I was going to focus on. This time instead I took more of a Donald Murray approach to the pre-writing and pulled out all the ideas and thoughts I had on Villavencio’s construction of her book, the message, and purpose she wanted to portray no matter how good or bad or relevant the idea was. On a google doc I created I slowly compiled these different takes, ideas, topics, and themes on the book before starting my outline. These groupings of ideas I created might not make a lot of sense to an outside eye but are what fueled the development of my outline and more importantly my thesis statement. Both pictures to the right of this post in particular were pivotal in building my thesis statement the top right picture provided the main thesis ideas whereas the bottom one was more of different themes I could use from the book to support my idea. Both pictures on the left side were other thoughts and ideas I had that I knew I could use to help support my thesis throughout the entire essay in my body paragraphs. Doing this action of getting every idea I had out of my head and into writing helped to elevate both my pre-writing/outline and my thesis statement by making the development of my outline more fluent and coherent, which then provided a strong base for a successful essay to follow.

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The Effectiveness of Revising before the Final Draft

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The Effectiveness of Revising before the Final Draft

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This expository essay about The Uncanny Valley was my first college essay, so all I have to compare this revision process to is my high school essays. Before writing this essay all the essays I wrote I didn't spend very much time going into depth with the rereading and revising. The revision period for this first expository essay opened my eyes to the huge benefits. It started with Mark in class doing a small peer review and reading his sheet where he pointed out some small fixes and areas I needed work on. Some examples would be; to transition between paragraphs within the concluding sentence of the previous paragraph, don’t transition between two ideas too quickly in one paragraph making it unclear, or lastly too many dependent clauses and more transitions to help everything flow easier. After starting to work with his notes and looking at my essay from different angles it helped me to see what needed to change. Something I found helpful was don’t write the essay and revise it right away. When I gave it a day or two to stop thinking about it and came back to it later, I had a more open and fresh mindset. After I finished with Marks revising help I submitted my finished product for Mr. Spanbock to review. When it was returned to me with all his comments I went ahead and got the smaller easier fixes done, but wanted to have a zoom about the more serious revisions. One of the biggest we talked about being my third body that ended up getting delete which is hard to do having written it, but after adding a different paragraph in its place early in the paper I realized how much stronger my essay was. It brought my essay to a new level after accepting my third paragraph wasn’t working out and I had to take a different approach but was beneficial for the final product as a whole.