Throughout my writing career, I’ve had many different experiences drafting my own writing projects. With certain topics, writing comes easy to me, and all I need to do is create a broad outline of my ideas and develop them as I write. Other times, drafting can be extremely difficult, and I need to rewrite an entire essay to convey my ideas properly. However, My drafting process usually follows the same general layout and accomplishes the same goal every time. Before I start writing, I always create some type of outline for my work, and sort out where I want to put the ideas in my head. Generally, I think of the body paragraphs first, so I can properly introduce the ideas I have and want to convey in my writing. Once this is done, I gather my evidence and sort it in a way that will make the most sense and impact on the reader. Once this is done, I plan my first paragraph and create a broad introduction with a hook that relates the introduction to what I’m writing about. Then, once I write the essay, I check to see whether more evidence will better support my point, and if the order the essay is in makes the most sense. If not, I begin editing, rearranging and gathering more evidence to fix the problems. After this is done, I check what will be my final draft for simple sentence and structural errors, and make sure that I tie my evidence to my ideas in the best way possible. Once this is done, I edit my introductory and concluding paragraphs so they match all my new ideas.
Journal #5
In this section of They Say I Say, new methods of introducing and explaining quotes are shown. Once again, the book uses an outline style formatting to teach the reader how to use quotes properly without making it over-complicated. Much of this was review for me, as it was taught repeatedly since my sophomore year of high school how to properly introduce and explain quotes in the context of an essay. However, it did teach me a few new ways of introducing quotes that are less awkward than some of the ways I have used prior. For example, using introductions like “X agrees when he/she writes”, rather than just saying “x says..”. Another interesting concept is blending your own words with the authors, which integrates the quote into your writing more seamlessly. I also found it interesting how the book gave examples on how not to introduce quotes. By saying a quote is someone’s idea, or saying outright that it is a quote, is redundant and unnecessary, as well as just awkward. When it comes to explaining the quotes, much of it is again review from high school. It does state that it is better to over-explain a quote rather than not explan it enough, which isn’t something I had really thought about.
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