Entry #1 * Reflecting On The Reading and Writing Process
Most people who know me, know that I overthink, overanalyze, and make things quite harder than they need to be. I often struggle with comprehending texts, just as much as I struggle writing about the text. Because of this, I've never been much of a reader or writer. When assigned to read/write, I often immediately become stressed and down on myself. This semester, it is my goal to grow beyond this frustration. To gain confidence in myself as a reader, writer, and a professional educator. I hope in entries to come, I see dedication to growth in my new learnings.
From previous courses, I knew that reading and writing were similar processes, just as Tierney and Pearson (1983) state in their introduction (p. 568). After interacting with Tompkins (2012) Ch 1, and reflecting on writing I have done in the past (remembering mostly my undergraduate courses), I have neglected the "prewriting" stage entirely. I often found myself too focused on what the final product would look like rather than entertaining different topics and organizing ideas. Tompkins states that "70% or more of writing time should be spent in prewriting" (p. 6). This is a very astonishing statistic to me, seems like I've been doing this whole writing thing all wrong! Tompkins (2012) also asks us to consider purpose, audience, and genre in the prewriting stage. In the Spring of 2021, I took an Oral Communications course where we had three big speeches. I would like to say since this course, I have been more cognizant of my purpose, audience, and genre when writing. In a similar sense, planning was never one of my initial steps, especially while reading. After reading Tierney and Pearson's article (1983), it becomes clear that planning is an essential step to the reading and writing process. Goal-setting and knowledge mobilization (Tierney & Pearson, 1983, p. 569) will be two new goals when starting my Genre Pieces Project. I am very excited to see how gathering and organizing ideas BEFORE my initial draft can make my work easier and definitely more engaging and interesting to me.
As I read through the expectations for the R/W Blog assignment, I am excited to "free-write" but also a bit skeptical I will go off task. Knowing myself and my tendencies to skip the editing stage, I will have to go back and read my blog posts to ensure I have a professional written post with minimal spelling/grammatical errors. As for my Genre Pieces Project, it will be very important that I spend a great deal of time in the pre-writing stage gathering ideas for a topic and planning my steps. It will also be important for me to not become too involved in one aspect of the assignment. I am looking forward to growing in my reading and writing process this semester.
P. S - Bare with me. It is going to take all of me to gain confidence in myself and my work. In this first blog post, did I correctly use APA 7, specifically in text citations? I want to ensure I am using this correctly in blogs 2-6. Thank you!
References
Makayla, I am SO EXCITED for you and the goals you have set for yourself this semester! I have every confidence in you! This entry already indicates that you are a writer that who understands how to use writing as a tool for thinking. I also appreciate that you took the time to go back and use some of the digital features (*bolding*) to emphasize the specific terms that *you* were intrigued by from the readings. I also appreciated your emphasis on Tierney and Pearson's description of "goal-setting and knowledge mobilization." I agree, these will be useful strategies when you write for your Genre Pieces Project. They will also be useful as you write your entries for this blog each week.
ReplyDeleteBecause you asked about APA, the format for your in-text references were perfect. The only feature missing from your reference list was italics. When including a citation for a journal article, the title of the *journal* (i.e., Language Arts) as well as the number of the volume (i.e., 60) are both italicized. When including a citation for a book, the title of the book (i.e., Teaching writing: Balancing process and product) is italicized.
P.S. Is your middle name Rose? I have to ask because my best friend from grade school is also named Rose. Love that name!