When we were first assigned this project, I thought that it was pretty awesome. Professor Linthicum told us that we had to pick a place and study it. At that moment so many places came to my mind. I thought of Mill Avenue, Old Main, Tempe Marketplace, and many other places. Then I hear that we had to choose a place on the Arizona State campus, and most of my ideas didn't necessarily fit that category. I also found out that our paper had to be at least four pages, then I was stressed. I needed to find a place that had a lot of information to give and also a place that I would find interesting. Coming to Arizona State I always found the busy stairs of Hayden library to be kind of interesting. I have seen people trip and run on those stairs. There is also a bunch of tables around and I figured I could observe those people too. When it came time to do the notes, it was raining! Later that night it had stopped raining, so I went back to Hayden and there was really no one outside. I was panicing a little. As I was walking back to my dorm I saw a lot of people at the SRC fields. The SRC fields would have been my first choice except I thought that a lot of other people would pick the SRC fields too. When I was taking notes on the SRC I realized that there was a lot to it. I felt confident about filling those 4 pages up. I sat down at my computer and started typing. That is how I started my rough draft. Looking back, I should have made an outline and I should have thought of some key points to put in my essay. When I was sitting at my desk typing the paper, I also found it difficult to get the paper to be four pages. I started to talk about pointless things that didn't belong in my paper to try to fill it up, but I only wrote two and a half pages. Another difficulty I found was incorporating a lens yet also putting my own opinions in the paper at the same time. For my final draft I am going to make an outline before writing and I am going to study the readings that we need to use as a reference in our paper so that its easier to use them. I think that my analysis and ideas were good, but just not fully developed. If I just dig deeper into my points, then I think that it can be a great analysis. I think that a way to incorporate this project to the real world is to use analysis while looking for a house or an apartment. I would want to know the ins and outs of a place that I would be planning on living in for a while.
We had some similar thought when it came to this project. I was my first writing project that I had had in a while because I did not have a project for English all of senior year, to say the least I was stressing too. And also on my observation day it was raining as well so that really put a damper on the observation. What I did like that you did was change your location for the observation. I feel like the Hayden library boring since I have a class there three times a week I am familiar with it. But the Student Rec Center is way more interesting because the dynamics of the place. There are intramural football games going on late into the night, rugby practice, people out to run laps around the area, and people out just to throw a ball or play catch. So the fact that you changed your location had to have made it easier to write since there is a lot more going on at the SRC than the Hayden library. Now into the paper we both struggled with incorporating a lens,which
ReplyDeleteI am sure everyone struggled with. But I found it easier to do after the workshop because Professor L helped me with incorporating it into my paper, I do not know if you did the same but the workshops really helped when it came to writing this paper.
We had similar issues in this project. In another class of mine, I had already been assigned a long paper to do, and I accomplished it fairly easily. This one, not so easy. I realized that with the other paper, I basically had a set of questions I needed to answer, and it would be at 1000 words before I knew it. In project one, we had to analyze versus answer specific questions, so I panicked. The two issues you had with writing it were the ones I had as well. In my first draft, I didn't even incorporate my lens because I had no idea what I could even use it for. For me, the notes that we took in class were useful. I have heard that going to the workshops has helped so many people, so I intend to do that more often. The other problem was the length. Like you, I filled my paper up with useless information until I couldn't do it anymore. When I went back through to edit, I realized the places I could take some of those seamlessly useless points and turn them into a good story if I looked at it from another point of view. I picked the MU patio, so I cannot really relate to the lack of people at Hayden, but I like that you realized soon enough that you needed to change your place of observation. Hopefully we can all take what we learned from writing our first big paper and use it to our advantage next time.
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