Jaidyn's Academic Writing Self-assessment

One of my strengths in academic writing is that I can generally keep the paper focused around a central claim. While learning to write papers as a child, I was bothered by the need to have a thesis statement; my ideas seemed too varied and numerous to capture in one sentence. Now, having a central claim is immensely helpful to me. It influences every aspect of the work– each subclaim, piece of evidence, and quotation must ultimately act as support for the claim. Having a strong thesis gives me purpose and motivation as I write.

Before going on, I would like to say that I know how important it is for academic writing to be filled with reliable sources and evidence. With that said, I hate having to fill my papers with reliable sources and evidence. I am not good at research, despite hours of practice clicking on links to scholarly articles. In my freshman year biology class, the final project was a paper, and it was a stretch just to find the three required scholarly sources and apply them well.

Magda's Academic Writing Self-Assessment

When I write formal essays, I've found that one of my strengths is coming up with ideas and organizing them well. I'm good at brainstorming and choosing ideas that I like and then presenting them in a way that makes sense and is easy to read. However, sometimes I tend to "talk out" my own ideas on paper, causing me to sometimes repeat the same idea several different ways. So readers are often able to understand my ideas relatively well, but sometimes feel beaten over the head with them. In an essay I wrote my freshman year, for example, I did a rhetorical analysis of an excerpt from Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar, and while I was proud of the analysis that I did and thought I communicated it simply and clearly, I could find several places where I sounded a slightly redundant, which I feel might have been kind of frustrating for the reader.

Savannah's Academic Writing Self-Assessment

Although I'm not a professional writer by any means I've found that one of my strengths is finding effective and convincing research to support my argument and claim. In my Writing 150 class my freshman year we wrote a final argumentative research paper and I feel like I had found very applicable evidence to support my argument that poverty levels are affecting high school drop out rates. However, when starting this paper it took me weeks and weeks to come up with my topic and I changed it a few times in the process. I think I need to find a new way to come up with topics that are meaningful and applicable to my academic writing. Another aspect of my academic writing that I could work on is drafting my essays out earlier. In the past, I have been a bit of a procrastinator and I tend just to skip all drafting stages and just sort of "vomit" my essay onto the page and turn it in the next day. I think if I improved my drafting skills I would have more time to edit and improve my writing.

Dylan's Academic Writing Self-Assessment

   When it comes to writing eloquent and persuasive essays, there's still a lot I have to improve on. A majority of the time, I can have good analysis of a piece, but as I start writing the essay, I find I have trouble balancing the various points in my essay.
   An example can be found in an essay I wrote during the previous semester in my ENGL 251 class on Nathanial Hawthorne's short story, "Young Goodman Brown." I found I had insightful analysis of the essay, in particular with a reader-response approach of the text. When writing the actual essay, it was difficult for me to maintain a good balance between analysis and summary. I tended to spend too much time explaining the context of a certain scene and not enough time explaining the effect certain literary choices had on the audience and how it accomplished that.

James' Academic Writing Self-Assessment

                I feel like one of my strengths in academic writing is my authorial voice. I find that, especially when I am writing something that I care about, my authorial voice comes across very well. I have been able to write a variety of authorial personas, ranging from sarcastic and scathing to logical and unbiased. One example of this was an essay I wrote in Eng 251, where my teacher commented he really loved my voice and tone.

                One of my weaknesses in academic writing is my tendency to ramble. I am not very good at outlining. Because of this, my papers often end up scatterbrained and difficult to follow. I noticed this with a variety of my essays in Writing 150.

Magda's Shelfies

Kayla's Academic Writing Self-Assessment

Academic writing has always made more sense to me than creative writing. You do the research, you read the book, you write about it. It’s a simple formula; the steps are linear. Academic writing is laid out in front of me in a nice organized path of stepping stones. Except when it isn’t. Sometimes the stepping stones are laid out in twelve different directions in a lake of molten lava. 

My greatest strength in academic writing lies in literary analysis. I feel that I typically understand and can explain the text I am studying. I like having a solid source with which I can base my ideas upon. My weakness lies in my drafting habits. I tend to knock an entire paper out with one great swing, failing to review my work before submitting and hoping for the best. If I took more time to carefully craft each piece of my papers, I would be able to develop stronger main ideas. In my research paper about menstrual advertisements in China last semester, I was able to effectively explain and synthesize twenty scholarly articles, but I struggled to come up with clear main points between so many sources.

Rowen's Academic Writing Self-Assessment

In my English 251 class last semester, we were assigned a reaction paper in which we discussed one of the readings for the section. I chose Stanley Fish's "How to Recognize a Poem When You See One." I feel this assignment was well-organized. After discussing Fish's conclusions within the context of the paper itself, I expanded those conclusions to include moments in recent cultural history when individuals saw "poetry" (or, in the case of the evidence, visual art) where poetry did not initially exist. I further demonstrated Fish's beliefs in the opposite direction, demonstrating that pieces meant as art by one person could be quite literally perceived as trash by anyone other than the intended audience.
While I am confident in my ability to arrange ideas on a macro level, so that each piece of an argument works well with the other pieces, I am less confident in my capacity to arrange an organize those individual pieces. Many have said that my work is "too wordy" and that is something I struggle with constantly.

Baylee's Shelfies

Alyssa's Shelfies

My husband's and my limited collection in our tiny apartment.

Ariel's Shelfies

Annie's Shelfies

 Here is my little closet shelf filled with some of my favorites that made the road trip with me to BYU from South Carolina. 

Savannah's Shelfies

A shelfie of my incredibly boring apartment books.

I'll need to add more books but there's so many good options!

Maddi's Shelfies

Here's my Shelfie! Featuring my closet and my favorite books. 

This is my Goodreads profile, showing a few of my favorite books and a fish I caught this summer. 

Matt's Shelfies

My bookshelf is depressing, so I took one at the HBLL.

Jaidyn's Shelfies

 Me, at the most aesthetically pleasing shelf in the BYU bookstore (fiction).

A snapshot of my shelf!

Sophie's Shelfies

My limited college book collection of some of my favorites!

James' Shelfies

As you can see, my shelfie isn't much. I literally just have a pile of books on my floor in my apartment. But that's life! =)

Caroline's Shelfies

I will have to give more thought to my profile, but here's the start

Only a small stack of my many, many books. 

Kayla's Shelfies

Me in Powell's Books, my favorite bookstore in Portland

My Goodreads profile where I have rated 173 books

Rowen's Shelfies

Dylan's Shelfies

My dorm room bookshelf

Here's the way I tried to upload my favorite books. I couldn't figure out how to format it like Professor Burton.

A Tale of Two Shelfies

Let's personalize our literary explorations! Critics of literature usually begin as lovers of books. We surround ourselves with them. I'd like my students to post two different images, two "shelfies":

1. Post a picture of yourself with your books. Don't have your personal set nearby? Then pose yourself near a bookstore or library shelf that has books in the background that are the type that you've read or enjoyed. See my example, below
2. Post a picture of your books on Goodreads (perhaps from your profile there). This requires first that you join Goodreads, and then that you put some books onto the virtual bookshelves available to you there. (While you are on Goodreads, you might take the time to set up your profile or do some ratings or even reviews of favorite books. This will be a more formal assignment to do later.)

See my examples of each kind of shelfie below. Caption these two pictures or just leave a sentence comment below each of them. This is part of building our literary identities, and using books as a way of making friends and getting better acquainted.

Overview of Assigned Writing

In this course students will be practicing literary criticism from a variety of angles. One way is via blogging, here. And on this blog they will develop and post -- before moving into writing proper literary criticism -- a personal literary essay. After all, we need to find some interest and energy from within our personal experiences with the literary. The, about every other week, students will write literary criticism at increasing length and sophistication, starting with Literary Analysis I (a close reading); then Literary Analysis II (requiring a critical approach beyond formalism; then Literary Analysis III (requiring scholarly sources pertaining to the literary work(s) in question. All of that will lead up to the big one, their culmination assignment for the semester, an 8-10 page Research Paper worthy of presenting at an academic conference.

Let's Write Literary Criticism

Welcome!
This is a blog associated with a course in advanced writing taught at Brigham Young University during the Winter term of 2020. Students will make posts

• to develop content and drafts for formal writing
• to get feedback from fellow students and to dialogue with them
• to practice online communication (including visual design)
• to respond to literary readings
• to report on research efforts and to provide information about research methods
• to narrate their process as writers.

I will also use this blog as the instructor as a way of reflecting on (or preparing for) our classroom discussions.