reflecton.

by Jessica Garner

The two pieces that i chose was my memoir and my nature walk piece. In my memoir i retold a story that i have told many times, when i wrecked my cousin's four-wheeler.When writing the memoir it was kind of about coming up with a good descriptive paper that can really give the readers a mental image of what you saw in your memories. And my nature walk piece was about a walk that in the woods that our class took at T. L. Hanna and comparing it to Emerson and Thearou's way of looking at nature. My paper was agreeing with the two authors positive opinion of the world we live in. When writing the memoir we had to use "brush strokes" to give our paper more description that would appeal to the five senses. So we wrote down all of the things we smelled, felt, saw, and heard from the day that we were trying to recapture in our writing. For the nature walk we had to free write about our experience in the woods to really get everything out of what we just experienced. The main thing that seems to connect these two pieces is the fact that they both were very descriptive. I had to be very clear in my writing, whether it be through a quote or a brush stroke.
Revision is really just my best friend. I revise my pieces so much i drive myself crazy with it but i am very OCD about having the whole piece flow nicely and making sure it sounds smooth. In my Four-Wheeler piece I mainly corrected things by adding more description in the places that needed it. I also had a few awkward sentences thrown in there that i had to reword. I started to focus too much on the brush strokes so my sentences stared to sound too choppy. For my Nature Walk the only changes i made besides grammar was just rearranging where some of my sentences went. In the beginning i had part of my introduction in the first paragraph then later took it apart from the rest and just elaborated on that statement more. I thought it turned out really good in the end though.
When reading my classmates work i picked up a ton of writing skills from them. I think sampling someone else's work is an excellent way to see what you can improve on your own piece. One of the authors that i liked the most was Dylan's stuff. It was so good and his work is a good place to get tips. He has good structure in his writing, which is one thing that i struggle with. and its a pretty important thing to have because it keeps your paper together! I have a tendency to wonder off the path so to speak which makes your paper sound a little sloppy. But Dylan keeps on task. He also has some voice which is a really big deal to me when writing. It has to have voice or it the whole paper sounds boring! you want to get inside the authors thoughts and you can't do that if they speak so formally.