Assignment #10- Thinking Critically About Peer Review

I personally find peer review really helpful because you receive feedback from other classmates and not only from your teacher. Also, what I like about peer review is that you don’t necessarily have go to the teacher every time you have a question. You can simply ask your partner and he gladly would help you. The strongest part about peer review is that other classmates are able to notice your mistakes when you can’t. This is a great advantage in order to receive a high grade for your essay. Peer review has a great amount of strengths, but it also has a weakness. This weakness is created when students don’t take peer review seriously. If you don’t take peer review seriously you won’t be able to help your classmate because you are not correcting the essay in appropriate way. My ideal peer review would be where students only work in groups of two for peer review and with the right amount of time for them to complete the peer review process. I think a class day would be enough time for them to get finish, but this also depends on how long is the paper. 

Assignment #15- Final Reflection

Looking back at the beginning of the semester I have noticed that I have made a lot of progress in my writing skills. At first it was difficult to write a decent essay. However, now I can do a much better job than before. I gain a lot of knowledge this semester which is going to help me in the future. For example, I learned how to write different kinds of essays. Now, I tend to use more complex vocabulary than before which gives my essay a more professional tone. I still struggle to write long essays because I simply run out of ideas. But, I know that with time I would get over that obstacle. Overall, I think that I have made a great advancement in my writing skills over the course of this semester. I expect to continue growing as a writer in my futures classes to the point where writing an essay would be no problem at all.

For my final portfolio I still haven’t pick an essay yet. I have some ideas, but I’m not sure. One essay that I want to use for my portfolio is the ad analysis. I really enjoy writing that essay because I was surprise with all the details that you can come up with just a single ad. The strengths of my paper were that I did a good job describing the ad itself. Also, in describing who was the target audience for this specific advertisement was. However, the paper has a lot of weaknesses too. For example, I noticed that I got out of focus because I was trying to make the paper longer. Also, I failed in supporting my arguments with specific details from the ad. This time I’m going to take my time to revise the whole essay and find any mistakes that I might have. I’m going to check if my ideas are well organize in a way that is not confusing to the reader. I hope that at the end the final paper will be much better than the last one.

I analyzed the essay “Free Speech off Campus Should be Protected”. In this essay the writer starts with good support for his argument. From beginning to end the argument was well defended with good evidence to back up everything he was saying. I realized that by having a well-organized argument and good evidence to support it will create credibility towards the author of the essay. Also, the tone was really something else. It was strong and confident which gave the reader the impression that the author knew exactly what he was talking about. Allowing him to persuade the reader to agree with him in his statement he was making. Lastly, the way he presented his evidence was fabulous. He connected all his points with evidence in order to back them up. I notice that if you have credible evidence you will have strong points. This taught me that I need to have strong evidence in my essay in order to have strong points. With all these points combine it would allow me to have a strong concrete essay as the final product.

Question: Should the minimum wage be higher than $8.25?

Thesis: The minimum wage should be higher than $8.25 because it would benefit a great amount of people.

• Compelling evidence: After examining my chart I noticed that my strongest evidence was that raising the minimum wage would be a great benefit for the average person. This is my strongest evidence because is something logical that if you get pay more at your job the better life you would have. Getting pay only $8.25 an hour is not enough to support yourself or a family due to the high market prices. Not only that, but it would also benefit the economy because people would have more money to waste giving the economy a little boost.

•  Weakest evidence: My weakest evidence is that not all states have a minimum wage of $8.25 an hour. Other states have higher hourly rate compare to Illinois. However, I argue that not all the states pay a decent wage others pay more and others pay less. Therefore, an exact amount should be established for all states, but this amount should be a fair one where both the state and the worker can benefit from it. Also, others may argue that this will affect small parties who don’t have the capital to pay more to their workers. This may be true in a way, but keep in mind that most places who pay the minimum wage are large corporations who have the capital to pay more and they are still giving out the minimum wage to their workers.

Assignment #11- Patterns of Error

I have many patterns of errors when I write. For example, I tend to use low vocabulary words, I don’t really use high elevated words. First, I’m not use to that. Second, because sometimes I’m not sure if it would make sense if I change a word for another. Another, pattern is that I repeat myself too much. I use the same idea, but I just rewrite it differently. However, it’s still the same point or I tend to use the same words almost in every sentence. Also, when I writing I put extra words or information in a sentences making it more difficult for the reader to understand the point of the sentences. Most of the time the point can be projected it without extra information and in a much concrete way. I have discovered several patterns when I write and I’m working on correcting them. However, it’s not too easy to accomplish that. Once you get use to a way of writing it’s difficult to change that habit and it’s also, very difficult to pick up you own writing errors. Yet, with time and practice I will be able to write much better and hopefully my writing pattern errors would have disappeared by then. 

My college experience has been awesome so far. I have enjoyed it a lot and I have learned a lot from it too. At first I thought that it would be hard or boring because I wouldn’t have my friends from high school to talk too. However, it has turned out to be great after all. I have met new people and new professors who are really nice and interesting. Sometimes I do miss my high school days when I had a lot of fun during some classes. Also, I miss the days when my friends and I used to hang out to watch the soccer games from my school.

Yet, I know that I have to forget about that and move on. The only aspect of college that I don’t like is that it’s much harder than high school. Here you are expected to do high level work in time without any excuses. Aside from that, my college experience has been great, time goes much quicker than in high school. I still can’t believe that I’m almost done with a whole semester. I’m looking forward to the next years to come, I know they are going to be harder, but I’m going to be ready for them. Overall, my college experience is great; it’s something that I’m going to remember my whole lifetime.