Learning Outcome #1: Recursive Process
My most improved and most well written paper was our final, Unit 3 paper. I learned a lot since the first draft of our Unit 1 paper, and it’s shown with an increasing grade on papers as the semester went on. I learned how to integrate quotes from multiple essays into one paragraph rather than saying a specific essay belongs to one paragraph and that’s the only place in the paper that essay will be mentioned. Another thing I learned had to do with the pronouns in a quote. Rather than a copy and pasted quote with a pronoun like “me” in it, it’s better to replace it with [her] or [she] (depending on the context of the quote) which makes much more sense when reading it. After peer review, I ended up changing my thesis because it made sense, but it wasn’t strong nor was it arguable. It was the second half of the thesis that needed work. What was trying to be said was: all men who fall into the group of sexually harassing someone or even worse are receiving the same punishment. Not all of those in that group though are committing multiple accounts of sexual assault so those with one sexual harassment charge should be treated differently. My thesis didn’t make an arguable claim about that subject, but more of a weak statement that couldn’t be built off of.
Learning Outcome #2: Integrating Ideas
The connections I was trying to make were the stories about different cases of sexual assault/harassment. They were very different, all bad nonetheless, but they were all treated more the same than different. The examples that I compared were the cases against Harvey Weinstein and the cases against Louis C.K. Both have been treated relatively the same because what they did was bad, but there are people who say that Louis C.K. should get a shot at redemption and that’s where I think to two cases should be treated different. Louis C.K. was a comedian and has owned up to sexual harassing women, however, not doing anything physical. Harvey Weinstein is sentenced to life on multiple accounts of sexual assault or rape. Both are bad scenarios, but both are very different and should be treated that way. Louis C.K. hasn’t been able to integrate himself back into his comedian life because he’s not really had the shot to. What made it hard to write about was trying to distinguish the cases and say that they are both bad but, they should have different outcomes without taking away from the fact that any form of sexual assault/harassment is punishable and should never happen. The best way I could state those two issues was with my thesis; “Men are taking advantage of their power in the real world against women to extremely detriment points, however, they are all being grouped together incorrectly which is causing even more problems.”
Learning Outcome #5 and 6: Citations and Local Revisions
During our Unit 3 paper and especially during the peer review part, I learned how to integrate quotes in a way that makes sense in the structure of the sentence. A specific example of that was in the last sentence of the second body paragraph. I added a part of a sentence from the Stephens essay in The New York Times, but what I didn’t know was that you put “…” at the beginning of the quote because that signifies that you as the writing are not quoting the full sentence in the essay. Another more basic thing I learned with citing the quotes was the correct format. I used to put the citation of the essay after the period in my sentence, but now I know it goes before that period. What I found to be the most important thing I learned from peer review when adding a quote was with pronouns. The essay written by the author will usually write “me” or “I” or something along those lines, but those need to be changed when you quote that part of the essay in your own paper. Those pronouns in your paper will change to [he], [she], etc., because it makes the quote make sense when reading it.
