My Reflection on Writing

            The title of my fifth blog was “The Media and Eating Disorders”. For this assignment I was trying to convey the dangers of the messages from media (and society), and how they can usually be directly related to low self- confidence. I also was trying to show the correlation between low confidence and eating disorders and how, ultimately, the media messages can lead to such eating disorders. For this blog, my audience members consisted of anyone on the internet, but mostly my classmates. With this in mind, I assumed that they were not experts on eating disorders, and I tried to explain everything in detail and in simple terms that anyone could understand. My thesis statement was, “Although media cannot be completely to blame, there is still a lot of evidence that adolescents will sometimes do anything to look like celebrities portrayed in the media”. For the most part, there are all three parts of this thesis, but it does not necessarily explain the point of my paper. I thought I worked well with another's work. I included three separate works in my blog- two that supported my point and one that rejected it. I thought I did a good job analyzing other work to enhance the message of my paper. In my first two body paragraphs, I used the work that supported my claim. In the last paragraph I used the one that went against it and used the conclusion to tie everything together and I clearly explain why the opposition was wrong.

My research paper was titled “Year- Round Schooling” and I explained why there should be schooling year- round. I was trying to convince people that the school system in America is outdated and should be revised. My classmates were my audience, and because of this, I defined key terms that were important and I provided a lot of evidence and examples so they would think I was somewhat credible. My thesis statement was, “As other countries are quickly progressing, the United States should adopt a year- round schooling system in order to better educate its students”. This thesis definitely has a context, subject, and claim and specifically related to the whole research paper. I thought I analyzed the 15 sources really well and used them to provide appropriate statistics and facts in my paper.

In comparing my fifth blog to my final research paper, it is obvious that my writing has improved. The tone in my blog is extremely informal and slightly immature. The thesis in my blog was too broad and was not what I was trying to explain in my paper because it was not specific enough. The thesis for my research paper is more detailed and consisted of exactly I was going to write in my paper. Previously, I was inexperienced with including anothers work in my writing, but my research paper shows that I can finally incorporate with ease. I also learned and became more familiar with using an APA style format for citations instead of MLA. To me, it is important to understand how to use different formats because they are being updated and I do not want to fall behind.