Essay 2

When I first read the prompt for the second essay my first thoughts were mixed. One of them was, "oh yeah, I can do this piece of cake" and the other was, "wait, how ARE these related????"... yes with four question marks, each one progressively growing with each second added pondering to the train of thought.
Then it came down to writing. So, I first read all three readings and then just let my brain do the work while i stared at the wall.

I took out a piece of paper and wrote down what I thought the first reading was about and the main emphasis. After, I did the same for the other two and then just thought again. I reread all three and then wrote down what they had in common. I didn't find it particularly difficult after I wrote down the ties between them and just thought about how I could word it. Sometimes I feel how things are related but can't really explain it properly. Once I got my main idea, I looked through the parts of the readings that grabbed my eye aggressively and wrote down the quotes that went with it.

At first I thought, "oh man, how am i supposed to write about three articles without losing focus?" I didn't want my paper to experience the "tree in the middle of the ocean" phenomena. Then I thought about just writing the main things and then adding meat to the bones. I worked information back into the paper to make sure I wasn't losing focus. I felt that it really helped to stay on track. It made the writing process more enjoyable and I actually took less time writing this essay than the first because I felt like I had direction with this essay more.

The mistake I keep making is quoting. I have a habit of quoting things I think are useful so I quote quotes. Big mistake. After this essay's conference, I feel like I learned what to do now. I like that feeling. Other than that citing in general isn't much of a problem. The problem is what I cite. But now I  have the handle on not quoting quotes so I cite the right source. Good deal.

Essay 1

I found that the first essay was kinda hard to write. I'm not sure if it's because it was the first essay I had to write for English class in over 2 years or what but I just couldn't find a way to achieve what I wanted to. I'd like to blame my reading. It was one James Wood's "Victory Speech" which was basically a summary on President-Elect Barack Obama. It felt like I was doing a summary on a summary...it kinda felt like one of those twilight zone episodes when you see a tv in a tv in a tv... a never ending sequence of space and time.

ANYWAY, since I didn't see how any other summary would be easier to write, I went along with this strange case.

When I got my essay back I realized that I did cite the author too much. I think that was the hardest part about writing the essay - finding the balance. Which, by the way, I haven't been able to find. I don't know how to write a summary with less of the author's input. It makes my head hurt to try to figure out how to write about what someone wrote without citing them for everything. I have a lack of words to explain what they mean without using exactly what they wrote all the time. It would be easier if I could just put a hyperlink to the actual essay.

I guess that would defeat the purpose of summarizing. Either way, summarizing seemed like an easy task at first but it was a lot harder than I was anticipating.

Another thing that was hard to do was to think about what to summarize. What the main concepts of the reading was to summarize. It was hard to write about what seemed important when it very well could not be significant at all and how much of it needed to go into detail. When I'm rewriting it, I will definitely have to reread the piece and  think about what still sticks out and hopefully that will make more of a difference. I'll try harder to step out of my skin to see if I would understand what was going on if i was the person reading my summary.