This quarter, the greatest practice I’ve learned in terms of reading strategies is annotating to more actively focus on what I’ve read as well as look back to specific moments within the readings. Annotating has drastically improved my reading skills as, in high school English classes, I would never do the reading assignments because I was always distracted and felt discouraged that what I was reading wouldn’t stick; it felt like a waste of time. ADD SPECIFICS FROM HS?. This quarter, in annotating, I was able to refer back to specific moments as physically highlighting and noting important parts meant that I was actively processing what I was reading, illustrating how making reading a physical process supported my ability to retain information. Alongside retaining information, annotating helped me to refer back to specific parts of the book more easily as changing colors and styles of what I was annotating made it easier to spot where I learn about a new character, place, or important quote. If I wanted to search for Trevor Noah perforating his cousin Bulelwa’s ear drum in the memoir Born A Crime, I would know that I highlighted new characters in orange and underlined their relation to him or I could recall that I highlighted the moment that comes just after—when his grandmother wouldn’t hit a white child— and know that I could find it the page before. This illustrates how actively reading through annotation helped me pinpoint certain moments in addition to how it helped me retain specific moments within the text.
The two main strategies that have most improved my writing are the use of joining words and PIE structure to make my writing more fluid and arguable, and, overall more persuasive. My sentence structure has drastically improved with understanding the importance of joining words, such as coordinators and subordinators, to make my writing more smooth. In my first essay this quarter—the narrative, “Lost in Seattle”— many of my sentences were short, choppy and full of fragments and run-ons. I look back on my sentence structure and see several mistakes and just how bland my sentences were in terms of variety and diction. In my very first paragraph I write, “Green mountains, creating gorgeous gradients as far as the eye can see. Silky white meringue clouds, so low you could taste them. Fluffy cottonwood seeds, hovering mid-air and slowly descending from the trees like a dry warm summer’s snow,” visibly displaying my excessive use of choppy fragments (1). I see now that these descriptions could be brought together with use of the joining words “and” and “while.” I could rewrite this to say, ‘The green mountains create a gorgeous gradient as far as the eye can see, with silky white meringue clouds sitting so low you could taste them, while fluffy cottonwood seeds hover mid-air and slowly descend from the trees like a dry warm summer’s snow. This displays the way that joining words have upgraded my writing in that, rather than spurting out the imagery, they flow as if painting the picture I’m trying to create. I provide the logical connection for my ideas and my reader can easily move through my words, taking them in.
While coordinators and subordinators improved my sentences themselves, the writing strategy that elevated my paragraph structure this quarter was the PIE paragraph construction. The first PIE paragraph I wrote this quarter was a first draft for my “Happiness” essay, which had clear Ps but they weren’t so arguable. Professor Sartwell commented, “You’re almost there— you need your Ps to be more opinionated, however.” displaying that, initially, my PIEs weren’t as strong as they needed to be to make a convincing argument. Through practicing, my body paragraphs became stronger as the comments on my Born A Crime essay never asked “and so what?” rather, they pointed out: “an arguable and interesting P,” or noting that I had “really strong evidence!” In that case, I had woven in my own experience with being raised by a single mother to that of Trevor and Particia’s strong bond to get really specific. Overall, I now have more control over my body paragraphs, which helps me to really argue my points.
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