Even though I used this one for my midterm report, I feel like it would be a really good example for this next category. A writing style that I haven't used before. This was the very first assignment that I got in this class, and I remember that I was annoyed because I got the email telling me about it before class had even started this semester. My professor asked us to write her a personal letter explaining ourselves and our lives and backgrounds. She also wanted to know about past writing classes and our personal feelings on writing. I thought this was really cool. My very first college assignment was a personal letter to my professor all about me. I really felt like she cared about my personal story and life and interests, which isn't something you find in college professors very often. I had never been asked to write a letter to a teacher before, and this was really cool. In my letter, I talked about my family, best friends, some back ground information on me and my preferred writing style. I said, "I have what I like to call, 'the most boring life of them all'," which I think is ironic now. Before this class started I thought of myself as a way too average human being, but after all the work I've put into this class, I've seen things in myself that I didn't even see before. At the end of my paper, I said, "Maybe one day I'll find out that one of my great great grandparents did something really important in the world. Who knows!" which was basically me suggesting that one day I'll learn something interesting about myself. I think it's really great to see that particular piece of work here a semester later, after learning so much about a unique condition that I have. I really feel like this class pushed me to learn more about myself and come to discover a new love for writing. This letter is a wonderful example of just how much I have grown in the past semester with the help of this class.
This semester I took an LBST class on theatre. One of our assignments was to see a school theatre production. I saw Dead Man's Cellphone, written by Sarah Ruhl. I really enjoyed it and it left me thinking about life. I went straight home and wrote an essay on it and what I thought about the elements of it. I really feel like I wrote a really decent paper. I'm pretty sure this teacher never even read it, and that made me kind of sad because I wanted to see what kind of feedback I would have gotten. I think that the play really spoke to me about technology in the world and how it hinders our ability to live life. It was also quite entertaining, and I elaborated on the comic relief aspect for a paragraph. I explained things that I didn't fully understand about the performance, like the random dancers that would come on stage, and the weird fantasy realm that the main characters found themselves in. Those two things I explained, were in a "fantastical realm [that] is obviously not reality." But that was just my opinion and it might have been different for other viewers. I also talked about the minimal amount of props that were used. I thought it was really cool that the production was able to show so many interesting points without even using a lot of visual props. "It was amazing to me that with just a few things, an entire production was performed," I said in my essay, which I still think is a really good point. I suppose I like this piece so much because I spent a lot of time on it and really put a good amount of effort into making sure it sounded great.
With my evaluative works cited page, I feel like I really strived. I found a lot of really good and useable sources right off the bat. I didn't know how many resources were available to any given subject! Most of mine were found off the internet, and a couple of them were articles. There were a lot of cites that I found that would have been a lot more helpful if I was a doctor. There were a lot of big medical terms in most of the sources, and I didn't know what most of them meant. That part was kind of confusing, but I eventually found sources that were easily translatable and useful to my paper. My first source was really helpful because it involved statistics that showed benefits of a certain surgery. This made my paragraph on treatment options interesting because I was able to put facts and analysis behind my research. My third source is a website that has facts and visual images to help a reader understand. I'm glad I got to have that as a tool, because it was hard to picture the superior oblique muscle without a visual example. This website is an example of one that used a lot of big terms that I wasn't familiar with. I was able to make sense of it all, and it really helped me better my own understanding of the condition. My last source was from a very decorated doctor whom teaches at Ohio State University. This was one of the most easily understandable sources, because it answers a very basic question that people might have: "What happens if it goes untreated?" Most people that I tell about my eyes ask me about that, and before all of this research, I never knew how to answer! It was really great to have been able to find such useful sources and make sense of them all. I think they really tied my essay together and made it look more professional.
In my opinion, this is one of the most decent responses I gave. After reading my classmate's cool story about horseshoes, I gave her a peer review page. I feel like I was really able to connect and relate to this person's essay. My feelings were expressed as I told her, "...your use of sensory images really made it believable and I wanted to keep reading." I really liked that her paper caught my interest and actually made me want to read more. I explained to her that I liked her introduction and I thought it flowed well into the body of her story. I think that my review was good because I gave her a lot of positive feedback and constructive criticism, which can go a long way. I don't know how she felt about the response, but I hope she enjoyed what I had to say. I told her she could have integrated her sources more, but that other than that, everything else looked great. I'm a pretty picky reader, and I can usually spot mistakes and errors, it was really cool for me to have read an essay that challenged me. I think that it provoked a cool sense of sensory detail in me, and I had a lot of good things to say about it.
This piece makes me really proud for a multitude of reasons. This is the final draft of my research paper, and it is posted in the tab before this. I spent a really long time narrowing down my search to get it just how I wanted it. I also spent a lot of time researching and getting that research into the paper. I think that I did a really good job of integrating sources; there aren't any quoted sources, and they all seem to flow well with how the paper works. A lot of people gave me complements at the part where I said, "Living with the same thing your whole life, you don't know something is wrong until somebody tells you otherwise." I'm really proud of that statement. I can kind of imagine it in a hall of fame for decent quotes or something. Also, its completely true. I am also really proud of how I was able to mix my facts with personal things. For instance, when I said, "As I mentioned earlier, I used a prism on my glasses for a bit to try and correct my SOP. What I think is interesting about this article is that Feinberg and Rosner claim to have invented the idea of putting prisms in glasses for correctional purposes." There, I talked about some of the facts I found during my research and I also talked about my own personal experience and how I can relate to the topic that i was sighting. Overall, I'm just really proud of this whole piece. I feel like I got to know myself a whole lot better because of it and I learned a lot about my disorder. I also learned that I don't know what to call it. Is it a disorder? A condition? A problem? It's not a disease or virus or anything bad, so I kind of look at it as a blessing. Thanks to this paper, I learned to kind of like it. It's a really unique thing about myself, and although it can be an annoyance, I really enjoy the look on people's faces when they say, "wait, really?" after I tell them I have double vision. "I did this research paper for me, so that I could learn more about myself, and maybe educate more people on the subject." The ending really sums up my whole experience with this project, and I think that the reason I'm so proud of it is because I got what I wanted out of the paper. That was just really cool for me.
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