Case Study Review

Cliff Changchun Zou

Dec. 11th, 2002

        The primary objective for me to attend College Writing course is to learn how to write with clarity and correctness. I think I have achieved more than half of my goal. After extensive exercises in writing five essays, I can write with more confidence and feel that I am able to express my idea more clearly and concisely. However, I still need to further improve my copyediting skill in the future.

        Through this semester’s writing, I find that I am good at using details and examples to express my idea. In the first essay about hometown, I depicted several vivid pictures of my childhood activities. For example, when I described the fishing, I wrote, “my heart would suddenly beat faster. I grasped my breath, watched the bobber closely and pulled up the rod quickly at the right time.” In the documented essay, “Internet Security”, I gave several detailed examples to explain how hackers intruded into others’ computers. These examples made the concept of Internet security more appealing and understandable. Before this course, I knew I should use detailed description in my writing, but I didn’t think it was important. When I finished these essays and heard the positive comments on my vivid descriptions, I understood more about the importance to use details and examples in my writing.

        I’m also doing well on smooth transition of logic and paragraphs.  I know that one paragraph should not be too long. Each paragraph should only have one central idea to explain. Otherwise the readers will feel tired to read the long paragraph without rest and then lose their attention and interests. For example, in my persuasive letter, each paragraph explained one clear, distinct argument with simple structure. In addition, I tried to smooth the logic transition between arguments by using transitional words “First, […] Second, […] Third, […] Last” at the beginning of each paragraph.

        I’m grateful to have joined this course because I have made many progresses on my writing during this semester. For each essay, writing several drafts before the final one is very helpful. Each time when I began to write an essay for the first draft, I didn’t have the pressure to put all my ideas down to paper since I knew that I could reorganize and add more arguments later ¾ this made it easy for me to write an essay in the beginning. Before this semester, writing the beginning part of an essay was the most headache task for me. In addition, writing multiple drafts for one essay made me further understand the importance of rewriting and copyediting.

        The peers’ and teacher’s comments are extremely helpful.  In the first essay about childhood in hometown, I was encouraged by peers’ and teacher’s positive comments on my detailed descriptions. In my final draft, I put more emphasis on vivid pictures of my activities. In addition, the teacher advised me to write this essay around the central theme, “my family was poor but it didn’t prevent me to have a happy childhood.” In my final draft, I reorganized the structure of the essay and used this theme as the thread of the essay. After the modification, my essay turned out to be more impressive and compact. After reading my first draft of the persuasive letter, the teacher told me that I “didn’t have good reference to backup my accusation on Bush’s intention of the military attack on Iraq. This accusation was personal and serious that it should not be presented without hard evidence.” At that moment I realized I was not objective to Bush and put too much personal emotion on this topic. Then I did long time research. I modified my arguments such that they were objective and were backed up with hard evidences. After I finished my final draft, I knew I learned a great lesson through this essay ¾ be objective and argue with hard evidences.

        However, I am still not good at copyediting. Although I tried to copyedit my final drafts carefully, I still made quite a few errors in each of my essay. Sometimes I misused adverbs. For example, in my hometown essay, “fly kite onto the sky” I wrote as “fly kite into the sky”. Some other times I confused one noun with another similar noun. For example, I misused “polled” in the “pulled the fishing pole” in hometown essay, “Golf War” instead of “Gulf War” in the persuasive letter.  When I tried to copyedit my own writing, some errors always slipped across my eyes, even if I checked my writing for several times.

        I think the teacher’s advice is right: copyedit my writing one paragraph at a time; change the order when I copyedit each paragraph in my writing. In this way, I might be able to break the routine that has formed in my mind before I copyedit my essay. Another possible way, I think, is to copyedit my writing once in a while, such as copyediting my essay once in three days. In this way, when I copyedit my writing, because I have forgot some contents after several days, I can edit my writing from others’ point of view and might be able to find some personal errors. In addition, I can also let my friends to look through my writing. They can find some errors in my writing that I couldn’t find by myself.