~Writers Memo for Essay 2~

Thankfully, I'm currently very happy with where my essay is at right now. It's a relief to know that my paper is in a good place and to be able to move on from it and concentrate on other school work. I put a lot of work and thought into it, but really what helped me develop it further than I was able to is discussing it with Professor Thompson. Seriously, if you are in our class and reading this, or in any other class, take advantage of office hours because (generally) your professors want to help you. I know it's kind of scary to do because there's the fear that you won't know what to say or will embarrass yourself but she is really good at never making you feel stupid about what you wrote and just working with you to pin point what you want to say and it's really helpful.

For my readers when you're looking at my essay keep in mind that I am under option 1, but I didn't really follow the prompt. I have my own thesis and use my blog along with different articles to support my thesis. The type of feedback I'm really looking for is general concepts of how cohesive the paper is as a whole and what kind of impressions you have about my argument and how effective it is in making you understand the paper. Maybe if after you read it through write a summary without looking at the paper of what you got from the reading. I also want feedback about how effectively I used my different sources. And finally, feedback about any areas where there is wording or phrasing that doesn't make sense or you think needs to be added to in order to clarify my intended meaning. Thanks and good luck!

~Progressing With Essay 2~

I have been so focused on essay 2 that for the first time, I completely forgot to do my blog entry :(. I'm really mad at myself for forgetting since I haven't missed any others. I forgot to put it on my whiteboard for homework and I only thought of it because I'm working on my essay right now and I was thinking about my blog and about to look at it and then I realized I should have made an entry for this morning. Dang it. Anyways, better late than never right? I will compensate by commenting on everyone blogs I am following instead of just two.
I am working out my essay right now... sitting in starbucks... listening to paramore. So far I have written my intro and I just worked out how to organize the rest of the essay. I am planning on first discussing West's argument of how blogs showed different social languages and such and then I'm going to incorporate evidence from my blog to show how I did the same thing and it allowed for deeper learning. Then I'm going to discuss my third article and also incorporate it with my blog which is really where my argument will be articulated, so I might end up switching the order. I really don't know, I'm just going to wait and see how it plays out as I write it. I'm struggling with getting my ideas out of my head and clearly articulated, but it's the good kind of struggle where I'm working through ideas vs having to come up with ideas. The hardest part is making this into an essay, because in my head my paper should be layed out like the articles we have been reading. So I'm having issues making all of my thoughts and different parts of my argument form a cohesive paper. That will probably be the biggest problem for me besides the actual argument, hah.

~Examining The Article To Be Used In Essay 2~

The article I found to use in conjunction with West's is "Blogging: Self Presentation and Privacy" by Karen McCullagh. I found this article through the UW article search using the boolean terms we discussed in class.

Summary: The article focuses on examining how much bloggers value online privacy and how safe they expect information posted online to be. McCullagh concludes that her findings support the idea that bloggers either accept privacy risks or "employ mechanisms to protect [their] privacy" in order to "work on their self-identity."

How the author supports the argument: McCullagh uses the findings of an international online survey of bloggers that she facilitated to support her argument. She employs the use of tables showing percentages of responses to certain questions to prove consensual agreement (at least through the people surveyed) of what she is arguing.

Connections between the reading and my research: The aspect of privacy per se is not exactly central to the argument I am planning for the second essay, but parts of this article I think will be very helpful information. Mostly relevant is the argument McCullagh makes that since self-identity can only be developed through social interaction with others, expressive privacy and reflexive formations of self-identity are connected. This can be applied to classrooms vs blogs where the amount of assumed privacy differs because of my argument that there is a cognitive disconnect between academic material done and submitted in class and online blogs used to write or evaluate academic material. And, further, that this disconnect allows freedom of expression which (as evidenced in my blog) facilitates deeper learning.

BTW, what I just wrote is a perfect example of my argument because through just sitting here typing out my thoughts without fear of immediate evaluation, I expressed my argument in the most clear way I think I've been able to so far.

~Analyzing a Personal Blog Entry~

For this exercise I decided to analyze my blog entry titled "My Presentation." So basically I'll just list what I found and evidence that supports it.
**Socially Situated Identities:
~Confident authority on personal work
   -proposed changes weren’t for changing information but rather “reconsidering the groupings” 
~Tech savvy
   -scrolling heading
**Discourse Models:
~Academic material should be significant and concise  
   -"delete my last slide", "didn't feel like it was important enough" to be included, no extraneous rambling in blog post 
**Situated Meanings:
~"didn't feel like it was important enough"
   -reflects conscious effort to keep work concise 
~language- no slang but liberal use of "I" and contractions
   -blog post is academic but still informal 

~Reflecting on West's Article~

The first thing that I want to say about West's article is that I think it's funny. It's amusing how teachers study their students and experiment on them, haha. And a warning to keep in mind with professors! But I definitely understand the impulse and I don't think there's anything wrong with it- if anything it adds to the learning environment. I think that West's article will be a helpful reference when we are having to dissect identity information out of our own blogs. It's hard to objectively look at yourself like that without drawing on other information that we obviously know, so having some strategies like those discussed in the article will be helpful. Besides all of that I think the article is interesting, blogging certainly creates a more informal atmosphere for students and allows more of a free-flow of thoughts. But something to think about is if academia is transforming into this informal objective conversational place, will other aspects of discipline and traditional forms of schooling be lost? What might schools look like in the future? Everything online? Virtual teaching? No more textbooks? Something to think about... :)

~Feelings on Essay 1~

Essay one feels like a great start to this class. I feel fairly confident about my essay and that I was able to effectively conduct research and revise my essay. This was somewhat reassuring because I recall listing research and revising as weak areas for myself at the beginning of the year, but after writing this first essay I feel much more confident about my abilities. I feel like I was able to extract information from the blog that I followed and once I had my rough draft finished; I was able to come back to it more than once and make significant improvements to the content. Papers such as this can always be improved upon, but I feel positive about where my paper is in relation to how far along in the class we are and what is expected of our papers so far.

~Learning from Essay 1~

This first essay was a great personal learning experience for me in that I learned a couple new strategies for improving essays. The presentations that we made were helpful because as I was looking at how to explain things in my paper on a slide; I came to the realization that these explanations should be included in my paper as well to make it easier to understand. So now when revising future papers I can employ this strategy of pretending that I'm having to explain the content to someone else and then editing the explanations into my paper to help make connections for my reader. Another very helpful part of my revising process for this essay was meeting with the professor to look over my paper and discuss any problems or questions I had about certain parts. Not only did it give me several great ideas on how to improve my paper but I got an insight into how the professor reads the essays and what she looks at/for. I write best when I'm in comfortable clothes and usually in my bedroom sitting in on my bed or at my desk. I don't usually write at a specific time of day- just when I have time and it's quiet and hopefully when I'm wide-awake. This may sound strange but there's a specific type of mood that I have where I write best. Not necessarily a mood as in emotions, but just a kind of thoughtful mindset that is productive to my writing process. It also has to be really quiet so I can focus so I almost always have my door shut and a fan going to block everything out.