First Formal Paper Revisited

My thesis for my paper is about how Foer’s novel demonstrates the way that trauma affects people and the way that they cope with it.  I supported this thesis by taking quotes that demonstrated the emotional and psychological effects that trauma had on the characters in the novel.  I also used evidence from the novel that explained how the characters coped with their problems.  After I used evidence from the novel to back up my thesis and the main ideas of my paragraphs, I did my best to explain the evidence that I used.  I felt that the explanations I provided for the evidence I used were clear and concise.  The explanations in my body paragraphs are definitely strengths in my essay.  They flow well and offer good, detailed interpretations of the quotations that I used to back up my point of view.

My peer review partner felt that I had a good strong thesis.  It was pretty clear, but he advised that I should try to make it more specific.  I cannot really think of a way of making my thesis more specific without giving away the topic sentences of my body paragraphs. Although my thesis seems strong and clear,  I feel that it is most likely one of the weak points of my paper.

I plan to attempt to revise my thesis statement, but I cannot really think of a good way how to yet. My main revisions for my paper are mostly just going to be changing up some words.  I plan on changing words where ever possible to improve transitions which will create a better flow for my overall paper. I do not feel that I need to make any drastic changes to my paper. The only drastic change that would have been necessary would have been to my thesis statement, but I fixed that in my first draft.

The Writer Known as Me

I used to dislike writing when I was younger.  I would always dread writing an essay or a paper because I felt that writing was never really one of my strong points.  I kept this feeling until I entered into high school.  During high school was when I started to feel that writing was no longer a weak point for me.  This happened during my freshmen and  junior years in high school.  My freshmen teacher helped my understand how to properly write formal papers.  The way that she did this was she had my class order a book titled Writers Inc. This book really helped me understand how to write properly.  I ended up realizing that my strengths in writing were grammar, punctuation, and flow.

I feel that flow is the strongest quality I have as a writer because I tend to rewrite entire sentences just to make the flow smoother. My next strongest quality as a writer is grammar.  I have my elementary school teachers to thank for this because I retained a lot of the things that they taught me. My last good quality as a writer is punctuation because I tend to have  good general idea where commas and other punctuation marks belong.  If I do not know if or where a punctuation mark belongs, I stress myself until I find out the right information about it.  These strengths are the reason why I feel that I am better at formal writing than I am at creative writing.  This is why the best paper that I have written so far has definitely been my senior year research paper.

My main weakness is creative writing.  I find it hard to get my creative ideas down on paper.  My ideas tend to jumble up and follow any sort of train of thought.  This is one thing that I hope to be able to change in the future.