Reflection

Writing, like many things in life, is a process that takes time, dedication and skill. Throughout the semester my writing abilities, and consequently the quality of my blog, has evolved. Creating a strong first and last sentence for my posts is my constant struggle after working so hard to write works that flow smoothly. The way I would seamlessly connect my blogs and try to tell a story became my greatest concern when I designed the order of works for my project. My first blog post lays out a very general and literary base, involving two key terms-audience and genre. In this post, I outlined the importance of their relationship in writing. I choose fundamental groundwork as the introduction for my project because it explains how the genre and audience always must be addressed in all works. My second blog post is one of my personal narratives, which expresses my feelings and provides my experiences as evidence for my argument. In my third writing, I build a bridge between food, observations, and enviroment. Descriptions, imagery and film directions transport my reader in my fourth post into the realm of cooking shows. Finally, my favorite, the last blog post compares and contrasts my grandmother’s and my own perspective surrounding food. The post is completed with this final sentence, “The comparison of our perspectives toward food mirrors this clash of our generations and gives so much meaning to the evolution of women’s role in society.”

I chose these particular blogs because I believe they exemplified moving themes and I enjoyed writing them the most. However, they were far from perfect as they had some errors that needed revising. Revising has always been an arduous task for me. With time it has gotten easier, but I still struggle with some aspects of it. I credit much of my growth in the editing sphere to in class activities, such as peer review. The feedback from my classmates taught me to be a more efficient writer, who is aware of their flaws and limitations and acts to eradicate them. One of the most common writing issues found throughout my posts was being too vague, using pronouns such as “it”, in descriptions.  For example, in my Ethnography post I wrote the last sentence too generally and being biased began my sentence saying: “Cox Hall proves to be one of the best culinary choices for Emory students…” In order to correct this, I changed the beginning of the sentence to “Emory first year students” as most of my first-hand accounts came from them.

My primary problem when revising and editing is that I always look at my work from the same perspective, finding it hard to approach it from another angle. This class has helped me view my writing objectively, allowing greater room for improvement. This objective eye has forced me to face my greatest writing flaw- grammar. My common mistakes span all regions of the English language rulebook-Verb tenses, sentence fragments and punctuation errors. For example, in this sentence: “Thanks for tuning in we’ll see you next week on Chef Chu’s Culinary Adventure.”, I missed the comma after “in” something I realized when revising my writing. The instruction from this class has heightened my sensitivity to grammar flaws, so that I as a writer may better with time.