Feedback for Essay 2

Man, the holiday has sure got me very unorganized about my assignments. As I am writing this, I hope that it isn't too late. I think it matters most that I did do it. Anyway, Essay 2 has gone great so far. I followed up on the things I was going to improve on and started out with an outline. That really worked for me and got me thinking about all the ideas I had as well as what order they will appear within my paper. I hope that whoever is reviewing my paper goes through all the criteria and give me constructive feedback because that is what I really need. I want to improve on my writing and the only way I can do that is to learn from my errors. One criteria that I would like them to focus most on is the argumentation. Is my argument clear or do I have to work more on bringing that out? Do I follow up with the argument as well as show clearly throughout the whole paper what my argument is? Those are the kind of things I want to know if I am doing well in or need improvement. I know I am not quite up to par with the other criteria but the argument is the most important part.

Is my blog going anywhere?

I think the approach that I will take is to just add my view on the research and my evidence that supports it. I will be using West's framework to help assist me in the essay. I will be analyzing the fiancée of my blogger from essay one. She recently started blogging again and started a whole new account. Some of the things that she does is review on products for fashion as well as blog about her personal life. Being that she started blogging again, I can make a comparison with her and Phillip Defranco. I can see how a new blogger blogs compared to an experienced blogger. That will not be my main focus though. My main focus will be finding the elements in her blog that shapes her identity. Then I will make an argument and add to the pool of research just like West did.

You can probably tell that I have some things figured out which means that I am not struggling that much on this essay. The only thing that will stress me out is procrastination which is my own fault. As of the essay, everything seems to be under control. For the procrastination issue I will work this out on my own.

Essay 2 and my articles

I am still currently on a search for the one article that will be used for my essay. I have found two so far that I might consider using. For the sake of this assignment I will give an annotated bibliography for one but these articles won't necessarily be included towards my argument. I might find something better out there as my search goes on.

My articles:

For the sake of saving time and since this isn't much of an official works cited, I won't cite these sources, but I will leave a link.

1. Networked Exchanges, Identity, Writing
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?vid=18&hid=9&sid=1c5c8b7c-164b-4174-8ee8-4c2d39bb5d73%40sessionmgr10&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=ufh&AN=32771568

2. The Psychology of Blogging: You, Me, and Everyone in Between.
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?vid=20&hid=9&sid=1c5c8b7c-164b-4174-8ee8-4c2d39bb5d73%40sessionmgr10&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=ufh&AN=33608450

3. Digital dressing up: modelling female teen identity in the discursive spaces of the fashion blogosphere.
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?vid=4&hid=9&sid=dcb7945b-2621-4c2b-b5b7-04c3f1097f20%40sessionmgr14&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=a9h&AN=52062897

I will be doing an annotated bibliography on number 3.

In this article the author Chittenden, Tara asserts that blogs can represent a teenagers identity. Through her research of a fashion blog she is able to recreate the identity that the blogger is presenting. She suggests that "how teen girls conceptualize their online visual representation may offer a resource for how they come to realize their emerging offline identity". She is saying that through the process of online visual representations such as blogs they can come to realize their emerging identity in the real world. This article gives a good added on research to the already existing pool of research of social identity through blogging.

Essay 2 Updated, Responding to West

Today I am going to do these blogs a bit different. Normally I would just answer the assignment and get it over with. Today I am doing it a bit more casually and you an already tell because I am writing this part.

So today our professor has updated Essay 2. Instead of there being one option, now there are three options. We aren't limited to just writing about our first topic which was writing about our own blog. We can also write about a different blog and apply what west's framework to examine the blog or research and locate three other scholarly articles that have a similar conversation to West's. I, however, will be sticking to the original assignment. I wanted to take a challenge for this second essay and examine my own blog which the Professor said was a little more difficult. I also wanted to do the second option which is to examine another blog and apply West's framework to examine the blog but a question hit me. I wondered if I could continue examining the blog we did for essay one but instead use a similar layout as West to complete the examination.

Question to Professor Thompson: Can we use the blog from essay one for our second essay?

Just a little question for our professor since I know she is following us.

My position in the article is agreeing with the argument. Yes it is easy to agree with something but you still have to put the facts behind the agreement, otherwise it becomes useless. So I will respond to West by adding to the research with my own examination of a blog (either mine or the blog from essay one). I will basically provide my own research and my own thoughts into the whole situation. The way I see this is that it is really hard to disagree with West's argument and honestly I really don't know how I would if I had to without any guidance. I find it easier to simply agree and put forth my thoughts as well as the evidence to prove that. Then how will I apply West's essay to mine? Well I will simply quote from her the things that I find as evidence that connect with the blog I examine.

Boy this blog post has got me completely engaged with my work and made me think about my essay thoroughly. Now I just have to stop procrastinating and do it.

Article Reading

I'm going to start off by mentioning this as a note to the teacher. I can't access the 3 step quotation analysis on the resources page but its a helping handout so I guess it isn't required.

After reading West's article it got me thinking about our class and how the article reminds me a lot about our own class. Our class is similar in a way that we also use weblogs as our assignments to help us learn. These assignments really help us reflect on our assignments as well as gather our thoughts about what we have accomplished. This article gives us three examples of bloggers from her class to give us some details as to what the bloggers are like. Overall I think this article was very helpful to get us thinking about the whole picture.

Essay 1 Writing Process

I figured that the writing process that we followed for this class was someone helpful to me. If I were to add anything it would be a brainstorm/outline before the first draft. I found out that I was missing this part of the writing process because my ideas were all scattered in my paper until the revision where I finally got everything in order. Adding the outline process will allow me to organize my ideas into different sections like where I will include my thesis or my paragraphs with examples to support my argument. The brainstorm will help me gather my thoughts.

I notice that my writing feels unorganized and not so much gathered or processed when I don't do my outline. So I will have to start adding that to my process. I also notice that I tend to write better with music on and sitting by myself in my room. If I have any sort of distractions, I am unable to concentrate and write a decent paper.

The whole process was very helpful to my learning. I normally follow this type of process so there is nothing new but it is no matter what a great process. If I didn't follow this process I probably would be lost turning in a paper that is no where near a 4.0 paper.

Reflection on Essay 1

The writing process for essay one went really well. I like the writing conferences that we had because it gave us a chance to get together as a group and talk about each others papers. The readers review also gave us a chance to see what others think about our papers. With all the comments that I received I was able to better write my revised draft before it was time to turn that one in. I liked the whole process because it helped and if we didn't go through the process I would have probably done worse on my revised paper than how well I did now. I still think that I have a lot to improve on that this isn't where it stops. I believe that my paper still has a lot to fix and that it isn't perfect. This process just made it a whole lot better then what it could of been originally.

Implementing They say, I say into my essay

After reading part 1-2 on They Say, I Say, I reflected more on my essay and thought about anything I can do to make things more enjoyable to read in my essay. I thought about making an argument on my paper because my paper really lacked the argument side. I am also not very good at creating a strong argument for any of my past papers. During my reflection, I have realized that my whole draft essay was just a basic summary and examples with facts to support it. There was no argument whatsoever. I thought to myself "what a better way to make my paper interesting instead of a flat out response to the research question". I'll be using the ideas I gain from chapter two and throughout the book to help create a argument for my paper. The templates will be a great start for me.