Abby's Reflection on the Semester

Writing as a Process

Working at the Writing Center has helped me tremendously to change my ideas of the writing process. I am so thankful that I have been able to spend a large part of my senior year working with other students as a writing consultant under Dr. Beam. Not only has helping other students with their assignments helped boost my confidence in myself as a writer, it has also showed me how far I have come since freshman year. The same exact problems that I had with capitalization, punctuation, misplaced modifiers, and formatting, are the same issues students now turn to me for help with. I find that I am easily able to connect with other students who are trying to learn how to fix their mistakes because I have made the same ones. Often, I will tell students that I also had trouble or even continue to have trouble with aspects of writing in order to encourage them that we will both learn how to become better writers together. 

I have acquired the most knowledge about the writing process through the students taking Composition I and II in particular, because their professors often require them to pre-write, make an outline, and then work on writing drafts of their papers. I knew that these were the steps, but I have not always been forced to follow them in this order. Mostly I have jumped from a prewrite or brief outline to *boom* a paper. However, for larger papers, such as Capstone, there is a much more complex process. Since I have spent the past two semesters working on my Capstones, I have seen my projects go from an idea scribbled on paper to something I did not expect it to be as I handed it in. Through drafting, peer reviews, and research, I would find that my projects would continue to change before they were finalized. Breaking large projects down into various drafts can make the work more manageable and less frightening. I am glad that I am able to help instill better writing habits in others, so maybe when they become seniors, Capstone will not be quite as stressful.

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Remember that you can schedule an appointment with the Writing Center when you are at any stage of the writing process, not just when you are working on your final draft. In fact, I would encourage you to come see us when you are in the prewriting and planning stages of your paper so that we can make sure that not only are you fulfilling the prompt your teacher has given you, but that you are also able to make your paper organized and flow well together. Here is a copy of the link to our page on the RSU website so that you can schedule an appointment.

Happy Writing and I hope that you all finished the semester strong!

-Abby

Advice from Abby: Seeking Clarity in Sentences

Over the last couple weeks I have noticed that students have been coming to me asking for help making their writing clearer. Whether the student is a freshman or senior, working on a summary paragraph or a Capstone paper, students need to be able to write in a way that makes their readers able to understand them. This can be difficult for many reasons. For starters it requires the student to spend a lot of time in the drafting stages of an assignment. Sometimes a writer may find nothing wrong with how something is worded—they claim that “this is how I write.” Or a student may acknowledge that something is wrong with how they word some of their sentences and that they struggle with trying to make it sound better. As a writer myself, I sympathize with all of these sentiments as I also have a tendency to write awkwardly.

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 A common problem that students have when writing sentences is that they misplace their modifiers. I know this is true because I have constantly struggled with how I place my phrases within my sentences. If you a wondering what I mean by misplacing modifiers then here is a helpful link that can help illustrate the issue (see page 4). For some reason, these types of mistakes can be harder to pick out if your eyes are the only set of eyes on the paper. So, that is why I will always recommend having another person look over your work—others can help point out where things sound awkward, and you can work on trying to revise those trouble spots. In order to illustrate this, I am going to provide an example from my senior English and Humanities Capstone project of a place that was not clear and to show how I intend to fix the sentences:  

This is important because in comparison to reading a novel, while reading a short story one is not distracted while reading it causing the reader to have to put the book down to do something else before returning to the tale again (Poe 572). Poe argues that “In a brief tale, however, the author is enabled to carry out the fullness of his intention…During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control” (572).

As you can see, I was having trouble incorporating a paraphrase within my text. It can take a lot of rearranging to make sure that in text citations flow within the paper. After working on rearranging the phrases I also worked to eliminate the unclear language that made the sentence sound too wordy.

While reading a short story one is less likely to need to put the story down before finishing it (Poe 572). Therefore, “the author is enabled to carry out the fullness of his intention…during the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control” (Poe 572). 

I hope that after seeing that I have had problems with clarity within my own papers that we can continue to learn to be better writers together. I hope that this is helpful!

Happy Writing!
Abby