Learning Outcome 1

Nancy Sommers’ Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers makes the point that writing is a recursive process in which ideas are supposed to grow, adapt, and change over the course of multiple drafts. She makes the case that many student writers don’t understand this, opting instead to edit some wording and grammar without changing major ideas or structure. In my project, Beholder’s Eyes, I used a recursive approach to editing and revising the paper. My original draft heavily featured the ideas of Friedrich Schiller’s sense and form drives. It focused in on how those ideas could apply to beauty, and really dissected them to try and showcase what Schiller was talking about. It was accurate, however, it lacked personality and largely lacked an input of my own ideas, thoughts, and experiences. When editing Beholder’s Eyes, I employed the recursive process that Sommers talks about by changing the overall focus of the paper to be a little broader, allowing me room to insert my personal feelings and ideas on beauty rather than analytically describing Schiller’s. This shows how I came to use a revision process of reworking ideas, focus, and structure recursively, rather than simply editing the way things are worded. I have drifted from a “student” writing style into a somewhat more mature, effective style.

Learning Outcome 2

 

My final draft of Beholder’s Eyes utilized quotations from at least one of the multiple sources that were used. The particular quote I will share was taken from Anthony Mueller’s Let’s Talk About Art project:

 

The subjectivity of beauty is no secret. One person may find a lake or stream to be pristine and beautiful, where another may simply see a body of dirty water. People can find a multitude of possible things beautiful, such as other people, art, nature, architecture, etc… but not everyone will find everything beautiful. In his essay, Let’s Talk About Art, Anthony Mueller describes his love of gothic cathedrals. He then showed images of gothic cathedrals that he particularly enjoyed to his brother and conducted an interview. This goes as such:

 

“ I interviewed my brother, Mike. Mike… isn’t a huge fan of most art, but does greatly appreciate music. His first impression sums his overall view on the Gothic cathedral, “I don’t really see the big deal”. I asked him what the building made him feel, it must not have been significant because he looked slightly confused on how to answer…I went further to briefly explain how the structure made me feel and then asked if he now had any feelings from the cathedral. His overall view seemed unchanged, “I understand where you’re coming from, and I can kind of see it. But I just don’t feel the same way”. I was baffled. I understand that art is a flexible term, but I found it weird that my own brother didn’t have remotely similar beliefs; that something which held so much meaning to me, struck nothing in him.”

 

This sums up the nature of subjectivity in beauty very well. We can determine many things about beauty from this interview, starting with the fact that Mike doesn’t appreciate most art very much, but does enjoy music. Additionally, we can understand that Anthony finds great beauty in the cathedrals, yet his own brother doesn’t see it there ( In order to understand how the sense and form drives work, we first must understand how everyone sees beauty differently, and how everybody has a unique set of needs, desires, and preferences. These needs, desires, and preferences shape how we interpret the world and find beauty in it.

Learning Outcomes 5&6

My final writing project shows my ability to cite sources with MLA format, as well as to make local revisions on spelling, punctuation, grammar, etc… One example of my sources being cited is shown here, a website citation taken from my works cited page:

 

Armstrong, John. “Can Beauty Help Us to Become Better People? – John Armstrong | Aeon Essays.” Aeon, Aeon, 24 Apr. 2018, aeon.co/essays/can-beauty-help-us-to-become-better-people.

 

As for local revisions at the sentence level, I proofread through my paper and search for small errors in grammar and spelling. I’ve become quite good at detecting when things don’t flow correctly, and as such am very good at correcting errors within sentences.

Learning Outcome 4

In my revisions of Eric Gardner’s 2nd assignment free draft, I made suggestions for global edits to help improve his writing. One specific comment I left demonstrates how I met this learning outcome. “ I get what you’re saying about the slippery slope in education, but I feel that these examples tend to fall under the categories of STEAM.” This was a critique on a section of his paper where he argued against STEAM education, yet the examples he used all fell under a STEAM model and could be replaced with more effective examples. This demonstrates my ability to meet the 4th learning outcome, being able to critique my own and other’s work by emphasizing global revision early in the writing process and local revision later in the process. One example of local revision I pointed out is this: “What are the brackets for?” This was because there were seemingly unnecessary brackets around the letter R in the word “right” ([r]ight)