"I Can See the Changes"
For this section I chose my, “This I Believe” essay to show how I go from stage to stage in my writings. This section is a good example of my theme because like a typical to-do list, there is much to be done, and for this certain paper, I went through numerous steps to get to my final product. For this specific paper, we all started out as a class by watching Randy Pausch’s, “The Last Lecture” and listening to his personal beliefs and how he delivered those beliefs through lecture form. From there, we all took notes on his lecture and then talked about how his beliefs relates to us and what each of us thought about the way he explained each of his beliefs separately to make different points.
The next few parts consisted of our own thinking and I have included these steps to show exactly how my final draft was developed into a totally different piece than my original thoughts. I started off with my daybook entry from January 22, 2014, writing on beliefs that I hold to be true. Next, I picked about two beliefs and expounded on them, in hopes of finding a possible topic for my draft. After going deeper into why I believe in what I believe in, I took some notes on authentic voice, read other essays, and came up with a main belief statement which shortly changed when I realized that it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to write on. For my final steps, I came up with a first draft, got some feedback, completed a second draft, received comments from my professor, and wrote out my final draft. All of these steps towards my final piece will be shown below.
My Process
On this daybook entry, I just wrote down some of Randy Pausch's beliefs from his Last Lecture to see what points he was trying to get across and what methods he used to deliver it.
This daybook entry is where I took what Randy believes and compared it to me own beliefs. I wrote about how he said that brick walls aren't designed to keep peotple out, but to see how bad you want something. I think that was a main point that he was trying to deliver and in my essay, I tried to copy the same repetitiveness.
This is another daybook entry that helped me to get started on my actual paper and think about which belief I could expound on and share a personal story. From this long list of beliefs, there were two that I happened to be stuck on: not giving up on your dreams and keeping in touch with your family.
From my two beliefs that I narrowed down to, I wrote about why I believe in my choices and thought about why I cared about those subjects and possibly why others would think that my beliefs matter.
To learn how to put my essay together, I took some notes in class about authentic voice and considering my audience. These notes acted as my rubric as to what kind of paper I needed to write and how to get my point across.
For my topic proposal, I started out with the title, "Is it Really that Bad?" By this point I wanted to write a paper on doing everything without complaining. When I started drafting in my daybook, I got a good amount of sentences written down and I thought this is exacly what I wanted my essay to be on, but...
... I could not find a narrative story or any reason other people would care, I did not know what to write in order to create an authentic voice. So, I switched my topic over to why it is important to keep in touch with your family. I started my draft and I even wrote on a personal story to make it even more authentic. I had a fear of my essay sounding too much like an essay from some years ago that was shown to us as an example, but that was not the case.
These were some comments from one of my peer reviewes, Whitney. I asked her for feedback on my essay and to see if it sounded too much like the example shown to us from last year. I didn't use all of her suggestions, but she did help me to come up with a title. I also ended up taking out one of my repetitive lines to make my essay flow more smoothly.
This is the last set of comments and opinions from another one of my peers, Sydney. I asked her if my essay seemes authentic and for other suggestions. To my surprise, both of my peer reviewers thought that my essay created n authentic voice. From here, I had a few thoughts on how to revise my paper to make it better without changing the feeling or the narrative it gives.
For my final draft, I edited my paper by taking out some sentences to get my word count down to about 500 words and I moved around some of my sentences for better transitioning. I kept most of my repetitiveness, but I also took some of my repeating sentences to keep my narrative flowing smoothly. I did not do much to my last ending sentences, because I did feel like I did a good job on concluding, but I did move around some sentences from one paragraph and added them to the end of my essay. All of this helped to get my essay at 500 words and create an authentic voice for my readers and give them a reason to care about what I was writing and why I was writing it. My paper ended up not sounding like the one from a few years ago, but like an original paper with my own personal story. All of these steps helped to get me to my finished product and create a nice essay.