Writing Center Visit / Blog 35

I went to the writing center this Thursday, and had Ms. Swift read through my paper. I had a goal of what to change before going there, that was to have someone revise my second body paragraph about the film that I am writing on. This problem had been confusing me for so long, because I could not decide what to delete, and it is hard for me to delete the masterpiece (in my opinion) that I wrote. I am pretty satisfied with all the other paragraphs, because I had been revising these for a long time and they are pretty much in shape. I think that it would be better if I could have someone read it and give me advises because sometimes it is kind of difficult to find mistakes by myself.

Ms. Swift told us how should the structure of a paper like this be, and told us the importance of each part and how they can be improved. She mentioned that the name of the novel should be underlined and not italicized, the name of the film should be italicized, and these should both have the author/director’s name following. I am basically working on my second body paragraph about how Edmund had change before and after he met Aslan. In my opinion, this paragraph is too wordy, which could make the readers get bored, so Ms. Swift gave me suggestions about how to delete the things that are not necessarily needed in the paragraph. She asked me to delete whatever I think that is not really closely related to the thesis or the topic sentence, and add more analysis of how Edmund changed overtime and the reason why he changed. In my second body paragraph, there was a lot of wordy description about how Edmund was, such as how bad he used to behave and what he used to believe in, but there wasn’t a lot of description about how he changed and why he changed after. At first I found the suggestion not extremely useful, because it was basically like she said nothing; everybody knows that I have to delete the abundant fact and add more analysis. But then I realized that it is not useless at all, because it is the standard to check if any word, phrase or sentence is not necessarily needed.

I found the suggestion from Ms. Swift very useful, it helps me to improve one of my very important body paragraphs, and made my paper much better. I don’t suggest having going to the writing center as an assignment, because there are a lot of us, and it is hard for Ms. Swift to read through everyone’s paper in a small amount of time and give very specific corrections/suggestions to all of us. I think it is also not the most efficient way to make our papers better, and maybe we could do some more peer reviews and I found it very useful; it tells us where specifically we should be improving on, and how you could improve that.