My Planning Page:
Due Dates: Rough Draft - January 28th
Peer Review - January 30th
Final Draft - February 4th
3-4 pages
Give details about one specific literacy sponsor and show how they have helped shape your writing and literacy
Examine one important writing activity to analyze its significance in your life and reflect on how it has helped shape your writing/literacy
Use 2 or more of the course readings cited in your paper
Go to the writing center
Focus on one specific writing activity you engage in that has taughtyou the most about your writing
define specialized terms, texts, or objects related to the activity
Format Guidelines
Double-space the text and use Times New Roman or Arial 12-point font and one-inch margins at top, bottom, and sides. You don’t need to include a title page, but you do need to include an original, creative title (“MP 1” won’t cut it). Include your name, name of the course, instructor’s name, and the page number as a header in the upper right-hand corner of all the other pages.
Guidelines for Evaluation
Offer readers a detailed scene(s) of one of your literary sponsors
Offer readers a detailed description of one of your writing activities
Create an effective and logical organizational plan through transitions of ideas and connected paragraphs
Effectively put analysis in conversation with at least 2 Course Readings through quoting or paraphrasing in MLA style
Provide a Works Cited page
Below I have linked my first outline which is a really raw conglomeration of the information I gathered throughout the previous weeks.
The above content was then extensively revised with several additions and elaborations. I like to get a lot of basic content out on my paper even if it is nothing like what I hope the final outcome will be. This helps me to gain momentum and motivation to continue writing and revising.
Writing Center Evaluation:
Dear Kaitlyn Yates,
The following is a summary of your UWC visit on Friday, January 25, 2019:
Visit login/logout: 10:49 AM to 11:49 AM
Subject: ENC.1101.0025 Gillespie 1650
Reason: Consultation required for class
Notes: Hi, Katie!
It was so nice to meet a fellow Katie. Thank you for having the only correct spelling. Today, we worked on an assignment that you had for your ENC 1101 class. You had to write about a literacy sponsor and a literacy activity. You wrote a mostly completed rough draft that discussed a neighbor that taught you how to read and an essay that you wrote about Mark Twain (when you found out you're related to him!).
You didn't know how to connect these ideas, so we thought of connections that you could make between the two. At first, I thought that the sponsor could have inspired you to write your essay. After you talked more about your ideas, however, I realized that was not an accurate approach. Instead, I suggested that you might be inspired to engage in literacy activities when you feel a emotional connection to them. You agreed that was a good point, and you're going to try to implement that into your paper.
After that, your main concerns were on the placement of your paraphrases and your word length. You didn't know if the pieces from your articles were correctly placed, and you were close to going over your page limit. At first, we tried to focus on the paraphrasing, but that led us to the page limit. You looked over your activity section and found unnecessary details to delete, which got you under the page count. We went back to the paraphrasing and moved it all to one paragraph.
While you still have to incorporate your emotional connection, your paper is off to a great start! Keep up the good work! And love the corgis!
Thank you for visiting the University Writing Center at UCF, Katie
After going to the writing consultation, I went home and revised a lot of my paper. I added more connections and created a better tie between my literate activities and my sponsor.
Peer Review Comments
Paragraph four is very long and significantly longer than the other paragraph. This can be okay, but I felt like there was a shift after “All that mattered to me, however, was that I had a personal tie to the author I was going to write about” (3). This sentence could be considered to serve as a set up for a new paragraph about the process and result of the research.
I wasn’t completely sure about the Mark Twain research paper being the literate activity until is was directly stated in the concluding paragraph with “This writing activity improved my literate abilities by giving me drive to do research” (4).
“James Gee also stresses the importance of allowing children to gain skills and knowledge through acquisition (20)” (1).
Smoothly set the scene for her introduction and description of her first literary sponsor (her neighbor from her earliest years) whom helped her develop literacy skills at an early age through acquisition.
I really like “Each person’s experience with literacy from start to finish is unique and personalized and the way that people learn and from who or what they learn creates a fingerprint of literacy so to speak” because it really emphasizes on the uniqueness of people’s literacy experiences (1). I especially like the comparison of it to a fingerprint.
The entire essay flows well; nothing seems out of place, which can be easy to do sometimes. It’s like every sentence has a purpose and is meant to be where it is.
Comments from Professor Gillespie:
Kaitlyn!
I appreciate the points you bring up about literacy and sponsors -- neighbor, military family, Mark Twain.
I think we get into our story (voice) around paragraph three. The first paragraphs have good info, but I think you could move that info later to interweave with the narrative reflection.
I'm drawn to the moments about education as a military family and your literate activity with Mark Twain -- those moments are doing a lot (showing your story + tying to Course concepts).
Paragraphs are blocks of thought, so try to keep them as together as possible. A rule of thumb is about 4 to 7 sentences per paragraphs.
Good job!
After reading and thinking about the comments made by my peers and professor, I implemented many of the suggestions and made some fairly drastic changes. I realized that I indeed did not have separated paragraphs. I tried to glue all the writing on one thought together in one huge paragraph and ended up having 4 or 5 paragraphs on a 4 page paper. I separated thoughts out into smaller paragraphs. I also completely removed my neighbor as my literary sponsor since I realized that the military was my largest literary sponsor. I elaborated a lot more on my sponsor to have an equal distribution of sponsor and literary activity. I also tied in my two author references in places that were more effective for the flow of the writing. I'm quite happy with the final result as it is the best way to showcase my personal voice even while heeding the advice of others.