Final Assignment Anthology

  This semester, I wrote blog posts in many different genres and styles. I learned how to adapt my tone and writing style based on the formality and audience of the different posts. My posts fit into the course theme of “Food, Feelings, and Film” because many of the posts were about food. While a few were about my feelings based on different films, the majority were about food: food places on campus, personal anecdotes about family meals, or reflections about articles and videos about food. Writing these assignment blog posts helped me feel better prepared for the larger assignments in this class because I got practice writing about food, and testing out different writing techniques. I chose these specific blog posts to revise because I feel that they all show a different side of my writing style. They are all of a different genre, and have very different writing styles, despite all being about food. Every Year was my very first blog post of the semester, and it is a personal anecdote about home and family. The Buzzfeed video reflections show an informal side to my writing. The Eat Drink Man Woman Voiceover allowed me to be creative in my writing and to write about something with which I was not too familiar. I included the Cox Hall blog post because it was my favorite of the semester. Since I wrote for my high school newspaper, this style of writing is something that I am pretty familiar with and enjoy writing. I also included my last assignment of the semester, the Proust Cooking Show script. This was one of the hardest assignments for me to write, but I think that my revision really improves the piece. I have arranged the posts chronologically because I wanted to show my improvement throughout the semester.  

Original: Every Year

Revision: Every Year Revision

Original: Buzzfeed Video Reflections

Revision: Buzzfeed Video Reflection Revision

Original: Eat Drink Man Woman Voiceover

Revision: Eat Drink Man Woman Voiceover Revision

Original: Cox Hall

Revision: Cox Hall Revision

Original: Proust Cooking Show Script

Revision: Proust Cooking Show Script Revision

I feel that my writing process has evolved throughout the semester. In my first blog post, Every Year, I wrote how I did in high school: all in one sitting, without any revisions. As the semester progressed however, I learned how beneficial it can be to write something, take a break, and come back to it later to revise and reread. That is how I was writing in the last few blog posts. I feel that these specific blog posts are reflective of our course learning objectives because they reflect my writing in multiple genres, they show my ability to analyze the work of another person and create something new, and these posts show the growth in my writing throughout the semester.

One of the most powerful changes that I made to my first blog post was the addition of just one word. In the original, my opening sentence was “It’s the same every year,” but I changed it to “It’s the same tradition every year”. I wanted to add this word because it sets a warmer and more inviting tone to my blog post. In my post, Buzzfeed Video Reflection, I completely rearranged one of the sentences during my revision. The original sentence was: “While some of the dishes supposedly originated in those countries, the people tasting the food said that the meal did not look or taste like the authentic version,” but I changed it to: “The people tasting the food said that the meal did not look or taste like the authentic version, even though the dish was said to have originated in that country”. I felt that in that paragraph, I had used a similar sentence structure multiple times in a row in the original. I knew that by changing just one sentence, it would help break up my thoughts and the paragraph would flow more nicely. My revision of the Eat Drink Man Woman Voiceover helped me realize the importance of specificity. In the original, I wrote: “To make my chicken broth, I let the raw chicken and boiling water rest in a pot for a long time”. In my revision, I changed “for a long time” to “for a few hours”. I decided to make this change because it makes my voiceover seem more realistic by being more specific. After submitting my original version of my Cox Hall blog post, I noticed that my sentence structure is very repetitive. I used a lot of long sentences, and didn’t break it up with shorter ones. In my revision, I worked on fixing that. In my original, I wrote: “Especially for freshmen, who are required to purchase the unlimited meal swipe plan for the Dobbs University Center, having to spend the precious and very limited Dooley Dollars can be a disincentive to eating there”. In my revision, I changed it to: “Freshmen are required to purchase the unlimited meal swipe plan, which only comes with a small amount of Dooley Dollars. Having to spend the precious and very limited Dooley Dollars can be a disincentive to eating at Cox Hall”. Not only does my revision add more detail and clarification to the point I am making, but it also helps add variety to the sentence structure that I use often throughout the blog post. Finally, in my Proust Cooking Show Script blog post, I changed the parts were I quoted Proust. Since it is a script and will be spoken, it is important to actually say that I am using Proust words instead of just quoting them on paper like I did in the original. In my revised version, I began each Proust quote by explicitly stating that I was quoting Proust.
            Overall, these blog posts helped me recognize some common problems I make in my writing. One of the most common mistakes I make is having little variation of sentence structure. Now that I know this, I will be more conscious about varying my sentence structure while writing my first draft.