Structure

Designing is something I have always enjoyed. Usually, designing something to get a certain point across comes easily to me. For my commonplace book, I choose a clean and organized look. I really like how user-friendly it is for my audience. The colors I choose are bright but not too bright they take away from my writing plus they’re my favorite colors. I also think this shows my organized nature and displays my personality.

Before our timed writing assignment, I was all over the place and didn’t quite know where to start my writing. However, once under the pressure of time, I felt that I was able to focus in and give a clearer outlook of my thought within my writing. Something that I need to spend more time on with the writing process is the draft. I typically write my draft the night before it is due which I’ve realized isn’t the best way to go about it. This is because the draft is you basis and structure for your whole writing and without having a solid draft to work with. However, the part of the writing process that works best for me is my outlines. When I have created a well drawn out the outline I am able to organize my thoughts, arguments, and topics that I want to include in my writing. One thing I want to improve would be the amount of time I take to edit papers for the final draft. Sometimes I get in the habit of not wanting to read over my writing because I am the one who wrote it and I already know what it says. never the less, rereading your paper is crucial to having a good paper without missing words or too many words.

My biggest struggle within this paper will be structuring and finding reliable sources that back up my thesis. I have ideas of how to approach the argument but I will need to find sources that will specifically back what I am trying to say. So far I have been able to look into the advanced search in the library sources. I have found a copious amount of articles that discuss my specific argument points, however not all of them are reliable and I am going to have to really pay attention to what is and isn’t a good source. Sometimes it is really easy to just google the topic of choice but I am going to try to stay within the library search engine, that way I know that it will be a good source and I will meet the requirements of using, at least, three sources from the library search engines.

I feel like I will be able to incorporate other outside sources and correctly put them into my writing. I am worried about finding good relevant counter-arguments that will help back up my personal argument. My idea I think is close to another writer in the forum or at least, has some alike ideas and I am curious to see if I can compare and contrast to make my argument stronger. One other thing that I am unsure about is that which arguments to use that are counter to mine because the other writers do have necessarily opposing ideas but more of different approaches. I am also worried about how I will set up my paper and where to place which paragraph.

For writing our literacy guides we were given a set of requirements that the guide had to contain. One of the  requirements that I enjoyed working with was the writing process and style. As a journalism major I enjoy writing when I am able to add my voice and personality into the writing. In my opinion, this makes the writer and audience feel more connected to the writing assignment and each other. Another one of my favorite parts of writing is the creative aspect.  I had fun creating a unique theme and different section titles that held my personality and voice. However, not all parts of this guide were easy. A challenging part of this guide for me was which sections of The New York Times should I use, how should I order them, and how much do I write on each section. This was a struggle for me given that the paper has an abundance of opinion articles of all different forms. For example, I had to think about whether or not the comments section needed its own paragraph or if they should just be lumped in with another topic or if the Op-eds are more resourceful than the editorial boards. I had to reorder my paper, at least, five times trying to create a layout that reflected the order of usefulness and importance to forming your own opinion. The length was another struggle I had when writing on each of the sections. I had to figure out how much it took to get my voice across with using all the required research and examples. I also needed to consider which sections needed to be further explained than others. Something that helped me when writing this guide was the assignments we did in class in the weeks that we were exploring The New York Times. The assignments taught me how to navigate and seek articles of all types throughout the paper. When we looked at the most popular page also helped me a great deal when I was writing my literacy guide. One of the requirements was including the influence and interaction of social media with the articles. The most popular page gave me opinion articles that were ranked most shared, viewed, and searched. With this resource, I could show supportive evidence that the opinion sources that I used were also used by copious amounts of other people as well. Lastly, during this project I learned a lot of useful things about writing. To me, one of the most important things this project has taught me was how to identify a writing type, style, and what details supported that finding. Before the literacy guide, I didn’t know how to clearly identify a writing style and describe it. However, now I am able to explain to another person with examples of why I can tell what writing style articles are. I also learned how a authors personality seeps through their writing and how much of an impact hat can make. I find writing when the author incorporates their opinions and voice more enjoyable than strictly fact based writing. Frank Bruni an op-ed columnist was a great example of this that I found during my research for opinion sections. His writing style is full of passion and reason while at the same time he tells the audience about himself as well.