Learning Outcome 5: Document their work using appropriate conventions(MLA).
I believe that my best citations were not from my Significant Writing Project, so I chose to use my writing prompt 3 citations to showcase instead. During the course, English 110, we used MLA to cite our sources. Coming into this course I was never confident when it came to citing my sources, I would always rely on websites such as “Easy Bib” to help cite the sources. Although, this website would often miss details such as the author’s name or the date of publication. During the course of this semester, I was provided with several tools to help me become more confident in citing a wide range of different sources. During our Writing Prompt 3, our Multimodal Essay, I used many sources. These sources included articles published in different journals on the internet and even a TED Talk. If I was the same writer I was a year ago today, I would have avoided using a TED Talk in my essay with the fear of not knowing how to properly cite this source. Although the writer I am today did not fear, instead I looked to my resources for guidance. I came to conclusion with myself that no one has the proper format for every source memorized. The resources I used in this course was the book “Little Seagull.“ This resource can help with MLA citations from text messages, having three authors, all the way to an ebook. After this course, this book is a tool that I plan to keep with me for the rest of college. I plan on taking an English class in Morocco that I feel this book could come in handy for, as well as different courses such as sociology and biology, as the book does not only mentioned MLA formatting but APA too. The one key factor that I am in love with about “The Little Seagull” is that one their MLA citation guides they provide a guide that reads: author, publication, and title. Throughout the example of the citation, they highlight these key parts to allow the reader to actively follow along and understand what information they are adding in.
The second resource that I used for properly citing my sources in my prompt 3 paper is Eric Drown’s e-portfolio. On Professor Drown’s website, he provides many Resources For MLA Citations. I was in Professor Drown’s writing lab and he addressed this resource to me very early on in the semester and it has reminded me to always leave a hanging indent on the second line and to italicize the name of the Title of the source. I feel that the image below, my writing prompt 3 citations best represent my knowledge on how to properly cite in MLA format because it shows that I can cite articles which we used a lot in this course and the citations for a TED Talk which challenged myself because it was a new skill I have never tried before. Another part of the MLA format that I feel I have improved on are the in-text citations. It was never clear to me if we should simply put the author’s last name and a page number. As you can see in my final draft of my writing prompt 3 (Multimodal Final Draft), I did not use a page number after using in-text citations, although before this paper I would always add a page number. The reason I did not add a page number after these intext citations is that I learned in this course that if the article is printed out, not everyone has the same page numbers. Therefore, it is incorrect to actually add page numbers since I was taking quotes from an article that I printed out. Before exiting English 110, I can confidently say that I can identify local errors in an MLA citation and know where to find resources to confirm the correct format of those details.
Learning Outcome 6: Control sentence-level error (grammar, punctuation, spelling).
As shown between my significant writing project free draft and final draft you can see a clear difference between the two as far as local revisions go for sentence structure. Coming into this course, I never realized how lazy I had been when it came to grammar, punctuation, and spelling. But how could I have been so lazy, these sentence-leveled errors were so important to fix! I personally found it harder to notice how distracting and unprofessional sentence-level errors were when I was reading over my own paper. I finally noticed when we started peer reviewing essays in class. I remember reading one of my peers papers and becoming so lost just because of mispunctuation and grammar issues. It would be hard for me to follow an idea that the author of the essay was trying to make because of the constant run on sentences. I would often find myself reading the wrong emotions of a paper by the improper use of grammar during an essay, such as using an “!” when the sentence was framing a sad and depressing idea. That was finally when I took a step back and looked at my own essay as if it was written by one of my peers (because we are always more judgemental when it comes to someone else’s work), finally, I could see handfuls of mistakes. I started making local revisions by reading my essays sentence by sentence. I would break down each sentence and see if it was making one point or two, detecting what emotion I wanted from the sentence to see which punctuation I should use. I found that correcting these errors allowed my essay’s claims to become much more clear. I personally feel that I never went to change my local sentence-level errors because I thought “I am in college, I shouldn’t make any punctuation or spelling mistakes” but I took a step back and realised we are all human and we make mistakes. I learned that I need to slow down and take the time to read my papers sentence by sentence to make sure the message I want to get across is clear and not misinterpreted.
