Reflection on Project 1

I will be addressing specific issues about my QRG and the challenges associated with it.

I'm sure we're all relieved we survived project one, so here's a happy looking deer.

McCaffery, Jamie "One Relieved Deer" July 17th, 2014
Generic license 

• What challenges did you face during the Quick Reference Guide project and how did you deal with them?

I initially did struggle with this project, because narrowing down a topic was a little bit of a challenge. Once I did focus on a controversy that interested me, I realized it was a teeny bit too narrow. It made it a little hard to find contrasting opinions and scholarly information, but doing additional research helped make up for the gaps. 

• What successes did you experience on the project and how did they happen?

I feel that once I found some beginning sources of information, it was easier for me to dig up articles that were related and reliable. I feel as though my writing was pretty strong too, since this is a topic that I grew more and more invested and interested in as I continued to do research. 

• What kinds of arguments, rhetorical strategies, design choices and writing practices did you find the most effective for your project? Why?

As I've said before, I'm a heavy revisor. Reading, writing, and  re-writing over and over again was very helpful. It was especially helpful to have the voices of other writers leave input on places that seemed weak. I tried to stay away from personal arguments and rhetoric and use a more professional input when discussing my controversy, and I feel as though that helped it read fairly well. 

• What kinds of arguments, rhetorical strategies, design choices and writing practices did you find were not effective for your project? Why?

Personal arguments, the use of personal pronouns made arguments seemed weaker. I also needed to cut down and break apart a lot of my paragraphs, as I tend to be a little wordy. Wordy paragraphs tend to look a little overwhelming in a more casual setting, so keeping things short and sweet was needed. Even paragraphs I thought were short enough I was told I needed to cut down because they looked too long. 

• How was the writing process for this project similar to other school writing experiences you’ve had in the past?

I've written some research papers in a similar format, though this project was less formal. I've had other writing assignments where I needed a certain amount of scholarly papers to contrast less reliable sites, and have needed to use online libraries before. I have had to write on controversies previously, and had to write quite a few short papers on art history topics. 

• How was the writing process for this project different from other school writing experiences you’ve had in the past?

 I'd never really been given an assignment where I could choose to research something of my own choosing, so I struggled with that at first. Where would I begin? What sort of topic would I choose? Normally this had been all decided for me. I've written papers in a research format that had a very strict topic. "Write a paper on the US's dependency on foreign oil," "write a research paper on your predictions for the next congressional election," "write a research paper from this philosophy's view point discussing 'Heart of Darkness'", things such as that. It was a change to decide for myself. 

• Would any of the skills you practiced for this project be useful in your other coursework? Why or why not?

I would say that some skills I used in this project would be useful. It helped me write to a broader audience (aka readable to more people than just my teacher), helped me learn how to cut down sentences, and helped me be better about reflecting on my own writing. Not only that, it's made me more aware of how I should look at the credibility of my sources when doing research. 


EDIT:

After looking over Alex and Evan's blogs, I felt a little more reassured in how I felt about this project. It seems like quite a few of us struggled with this at the beginning, but started to find our way more once we looked at the rubric. I didn't get a chance to look at Alex's QRG and only read a rough draft of Evan's, so I hope my writing ended up coming across as strongly as theirs might. I will probably read over a few other papers to compare and if I have to, tinker a little with my QRG before the absolute end due date.