The fifth learning outcome of English 110 states that students should be able to “document their work using appropriate conventions (MLA).”
I did not get many peer review or instructor feedback on my MLA formatting. An area in which I improve is learning to utilize different forms of introducing quotes and thus manipulating my in-text citations to account for these various forms. Nearly all of our sources of texts were from online articles; articles that do not have page numbers. I had never been faced with this before, so I did not know how to approach it. This can be seen in my rough draft of my Showcase, essay two:
“According to Scheuer, ‘the STEM disciplines are obviously important to economic productivity, but … The liberal arts embody precisely the skills a democracy must cultivate to maintain its vital reservoir of … productive citizens’”
(Ouellette 2). Essay Two, Rough Draft.
Notice how I did not add an in-text citation to this quote. I was confused on what to put there since I had never encountered it before. After discussing it with my peers and instructor, I found the solution and revised the quote over again correctly, which can be seen in my final draft of Essay Two (Showcase):
“According to Scheuer, ‘the STEM disciplines are obviously important to economic productivity, but … the liberal arts embody precisely the skills a democracy must cultivate to maintain its vital reservoir of … productive citizens’ (Critical Thinking and the Liberal Arts)”
(Ouellette 2). Essay Two, Final Draft.
As shown above, I learned that MLA format for in-text citations have exceptions and is more malleable than I thought, which opened up opportunities for me to explore new ways of introducing authors, texts, and quotations.
The sixth learning outcome of English 110 focused on the “control [of] sentence-level error (grammar, punctuation, spelling).”
I am not going to use a draft of my Essays or other work to demonstrate this ability, as it is something that cannot be tangibly produced through pull quotes or screenshots. While I revise and while I write, I actively correct punctuation, grammar and spelling. Since this process is ongoing and done less during revision than during the writing process, I would say that my abilities to correct these mistakes simply became more second-nature than prominent. I am able to focus less on these issues than the more global issues, such as analysis, developing connections and adding first-person arguments to support my claims.
Between the rough and final drafts of my Showcase Essay, my ability to format following proper MLA guidelines and control typical errors is evident. Since I already had decent foundational knowledge of MLA formatting from my English classes in high school; my improvement in MLA is deeper than the typical missing components. Instead, I learned how to integrate citations from online articles without pages and introduce authors in a variety of ways while manipulating in-text citations. As for local revisions, this process became much faster and second-nature to me than it had been in the past.
Rough Draft, Essay 2:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gcPW8SRmm5ofudPpuzK0h3yce0Z5xVjr6j3J4zVYpPY/edit
Final Draft, Essay 2:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rc9xgBkpHnuZm0AWvl0gGC5u1GZd3ooeEYaEKnKchi8/edit
