“Although Konnikova emphasizes the difficulty of online connection, Phelps-Roper’s story makes me believe that online connections can be stronger than human.” Overall, I like my thesis. The things I would change about it are brief but tweak it enough to make it a really strong statement. One weakness I think is in the word choice “makes me believe”, I feel like I could have chosen a better word such as “convinces me” in order to make my voice more established in my paper. I think I also could have been more specific in what online and human connections mean to Konnikova and Chen in my thesis to show how drastically different they are. I feel like I was broad in saying they’re “stronger” than one another. One thing that I did that I think was strong was recognizing both sides of the argument and showing there is a side to my argument. I told the audience that although Konnikova says this, I think this. This is a powerful change in my writing compared to my older academic essays.
I think what this writing process reminded me of is when I hit a groove in my writing, I can get a lot done. At the points where I am most motivated it always turns out to be my best writing. Starting off this paper, it was a struggle to get my thoughts and argument together and concise enough to make sense. I was all over the place and none of my analysis really fit together. My paper wasn’t what I wanted it to be. It wasn’t until after the first peer review to where I really began to become more inspired to write my paper and was able to work more efficiently during these spurts of motivation than when I push myself to write. I think this reminded me that my best writing comes when I’m in the best headspace to write rather than pushing through to meet a deadline.
I focused mainly on my use of both texts and the analysis that followed. I struggled with having quotes follow one another smoothly and connect back to my ideas. To fix this, I quite literally rewrote my paper. I went back and skimmed over both articles, compiling a list of quotes that supported my argument and contradicted Konnikova’s. From there, I actually wrote an analysis for each quote including my voice, connections, and comparing it to Konnikova’s argument. After this, I formatted the paragraphs in the order of the quotes and analysis I chose and added sentences in between each to make it smoother. I think this process of writing my body paragraphs made them a lot stronger in my overall argument. It made them flow consistently and all connect back to my thesis and main idea.
I think approaching Paper #2, I will allow myself more time to read and annotate the pieces. Although my work was strong, it was done in marathons of reading and writing that made me exhausted. I also felt that it made it harder to go back for my essay because I had read in one shot, not over an extended period of time. This made it difficult to almost remember what I had even written. I also believe that I should use the same format of searching for quotes and creating analysis, then formatting them together. This made it easier to get my thoughts out about each individual quote without worrying about how they had to connect yet. Integrating how they connect after formatting it made it a lot smoother for my process. I think I am going to be motivated for Paper #2 after the confidence I gained from writing Paper #1. I received good feedback from my peers and from both Elaina and Professor Brod. The feedback all inspired me to get back into my writing and feel stronger about mine. After writing this paper, I feel like I am a considerably good writer and on the way to becoming a really strong one. Another one of my most important goal with Paper #2 is too have it be completed earlier and leaving myself more time to be able to change things. Since I didn’t truly begin my paper until after peer revision, I did not have much time to put it together. I need to allow myself more time for editing than physically writing it the first time.
