There are five important parts of an outline: main thesis, introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion. Bullet points are the first thing to fill into each part which allows the “skeleton” to have specific contents. For the introduction, you should present your main thesis, the core of the entire essay,  and its supporting ideas. In the Uncanny Valley essay, I have first written a shortened summary for the book, then outlined three aspects that would support the thesis, later elaborated in the body paragraphs respectively. In the body paragraphs portion of the outline, I used direct quotations to support my viewpoint, in addition to my personal interpretation and analysis of them in relation to the thesis. The conclusion extrapolates the deeper ideas in a broader view, such as how the internet might homogenize the entire human society.

The development of one’s outline shows the development and enrichment of one’s idea. Motivations and connections are easily produced from constructing the outline. It’s a lot easier to first organize the ideas than to write them spontaneously, which increases readability for the audience. Besides, starting top-down allows for a more holistic view of the literary work,  understanding the information flow while not missing anything when writes the essay.

In the Decameron theme analysis project, we have all written down the summary of the short story and three major things of the topic we’ve read. Through note-taking, we are not only able to refer back to them when working on thesis statements but also develop a deeper understanding of the process. Take the story “Under the Magnolia” I’ve read as an example. After summarizing the main idea of the story, I quickly re-read the entire story and marked down the important quotes, which I believed contain the central ideas, from the story. I then narrowed down the theme into three themes: time, memory, and depression. These have been used later in both thesis construction and outline for the essay.

Thesis statement building states is the core formation process of essay writing. It helps us to consolidate our thoughts and focus on what we want to talk about in the essay. Setting the tone and specifying the topic for the essay, the thesis statement roadmaps to the audience on what the essay is about to what the essay will be about.

We worked on the thesis statement in class together. We first classified what type of essay we are going to write then listed out different formats of the thesis, leaving blanks for different topic sentences. Finding comparisons between the two Decamerons projects and the connections and commonalities of the stories in the new Decameron projects, we now are able to put the contents into different formats and make up several essays prompts. We then looked at each prompt and discussed whether each prompts contains enough content to write about and what related stories we can use to address the topic.

Under the magnolia tree

Systems

The Decameron has presented human’s core mentality of adamant,

The Decameron project is worth reading, since it helps people to slow down their living pace and reflecting on themselves

The Decameron project is a successful modern version of the previous one with connections and evolvement.

The Decameron project has noticed people to concentrate back to details and little thing in their daily life.

The Decameron project has failed to incorporates themes of 

themes: - loss

- memory

- lack of control

- comment/ people coming together

People can read it in past time to help get through it.

This story is very connected to the Decameron project. It didn’t mention the pandemic directly. Fits in the traditional style of Decameron project. Memory is pretty, I always remember what happened no matter good or bad. Some random thing can leave me with very deep impressions. 

During the revision phase of The Undocumented American essay, Dr. Spanbock has pointed out that my primary thesis is stated confusingly in the article, and the entire piece went off from the topic of text analysis. We went through all the contents and looked at what interesting and relatable points we could keep for the next draft. The common issue for all body paragraphs is that the main arguments are not clearly stated, and texts from the book are missing in the paragraph for analysis. Those feedback from Dr. Spanbock has helped me to understand the assignment and the essay itself better. I first revised my main argument, making it more suitable and relatable to the text analysis theme and the following ideas and evidence supporting it. For each body paragraph, I have introduced quotes to contribute to my analysis and have changed the writing style to more analytical sentences.

Although altering the ideas and contents is essential to the revision process, revising and fixing the grammatical problems is also vital. Just by reading over the essay, lots and grammar errors can be found and fixed. Then I have worked with the instructor’s comments to make other changes in the style of sentences. This step makes certain that no more errors will detract readers from the essay.