Prompt 1: Essay #2

I keep the idea of the institution being the school system, because I believed all the evidence would best support a thesis around schools. In the introduction, I added more detail about younger children, because I decided to talk about the entire school system, elementary school through high school, instead of just high school because some of my evidence lines up with elementary school children. Therefore, I also had to change the beginning part of my thesis from “high school” to “elementary school all the way through high school”. I also wasn’t clear in my thesis when I talked about the difficulties of being a teenager, so in my final draft, I clarified what kind of difficulties I was talking about. In my rough draft, I focused on getting my outline; therefore I didn’t have any evidence or explanations. So in my final draft, I added a bunch of evidence from the pieces of writing that I chose to support my thesis and I was able to explain how those pieces of evidence back up my thesis. I kept the organization of my essay the same, however, for each of the body paragraphs, I separated them into two paragraphs each. The first paragraph talked about a difficulty in school, and the second paragraph had evidence with explanations. In my rough draft, I didn’t have a conclusion, so I had to write the entire thing for my final draft. I also didn’t have a title for my rough draft, because my title is always better when I come up with it after I finish my paper. I wrote in my thesis, “doesn’t match the ‘norm’”, and I really liked that part, so I made my title “Challenging the Norm”.

Prompt 2: Essay #3

In my third essay, I said that my definition of empathy included the idea that you need to be willing to open yourself up to the feelings of others. By this, I meant you don’t need to fully understand why they have these feelings, you just need to be willing to empathize with them. I gave a piece of evidence from Jamison’s writing, which directly supported this part of my definition of empathy. I also stated that my definition of empathy includes not having to have been through the same experience as someone else in order to empathize with what they are going through. Ma did challenge this part of my definition, but part of his argument did match with part of mine. In my introduction, I wrote that empathy brings a community together and it can make them do great things. Ma stated that empathy is a huge part of who we are and this part of his argument supported mine. In Bloom’s piece, he writes how empathy is bad and people only show empathy to others who are like them. I strongly disagreed with this, because I believe there is more good in the world than Bloom suggests. I used a fourth piece of writing to show how my definition would change how people treat each other. In Amy Tan’s story, she writes about her life and her mother’s life. Her mother had a bad experience at a hospital and the people working there showed her no empathy. I wrote that if the people working there were willing to put their own personal feelings aside about the mother, she could have had a better experience and her daughter wouldn’t have had to get involved. 

Prompt 5: Essay #2

At the beginning of the semester, I was doing in-text citations wrong. I was putting the author’s last name, then abbreviating the word page (pg), then typing the page number. The correct way to use an in-text citation is to just put the author’s last name and the page number. I was able to use the correct form throughout my entire paper. Throughout my entire paper, I indicated who wrote or said the specific quote I was using. In the fifth paragraph of my second essay, I used a quote that had a quote within it. I was able to properly quote it, without losing the quote inside of it. An area for continued development is being able to shorten a quote without losing the importance of it and the meaning of it.

Prompt 6: Essay #2

I have always been fairly good at placing commas, because when you read it outloud, the sentence will run smoothly if the comma is placed in the correct spot. I do struggle with word choice because I can usually only think of a simple word and I end up using it a lot. So in cases like this, I tend to look up synonyms for the word that I’m using, so I can make my essay sound more elegant and professional. For example, in the first paragraph of my second essay, I used the words “compulsion” and “pressure” to replace the word “need”. “Compulsion” and “pressure” make my essay sound more professional and it puts emphasis on what I am trying to say.