English 101 Unit 1 Assignment

Throughout my time in English 101, my writing has undergone drastic improvements. The first writing assignment I chose to revise was Project 1, the Advertisement Analysis. My first draft of Project 1 had no clear thesis and no specific claim, ideally, an easy problem to solve. However, this was a common issue in my writing in most of my projects this semester, so it only made sense to tackle this project and revise it first. To begin revising Project 1, I first established my thesis statement which was that: the “Best Buds” advertisement was effective because of the incorporated rhetorical strategies and the overall theme of loyalty. I used rhetorical analysis, one of the portfolio outcomes, to find evidence that fit as either ethos, pathos …show more content…
I selected this project because I could of the improvements made from the first three projects. I had established a well organized thesis statement with specific claims and relevant and efficiently used quotes as evidence. The only problem, was that I was simply working with too broad of an idea and my topic had to be narrowed down. I was trying to cover too much information, leading to ineffective claims. My revision process started with eliminating one of the claims I felt wasn’t as strong as the main claim. That claim was that violence protection was a major outcome of social media. Although that is true, there was not enough evidence to write my paper solely off that claim, so I completely removed it. My use of sources also needed improvements, originally I would stick the quotes in without any context. To fix that, I followed this simple formatting: context, quote and then analysis. In the context, I would briefly summarize, in a sentence or two, the text that was surrounding the quote, this way the quote would not seem like it was randomly put in there. Then, after inserting my quote into my writing, I would analyze the quote and relate it back to my claim. Besides using a better format with my evidence, I removed a lot of unnecessary quotes and paraphrased them. I realized when I took a quote, reworded it into my own words, it was easier for me to analyze it. Relating to the same problem, a lot of my quotes had not elaboration with them, making them merely useless. The purpose of using quotations is to support the claims and give the reader a better idea of how the claim can be looked at. With paraphrasing, my writing became more interesting along with still citing the authors correctly. The portfolio outcome component of information literacy was a factor here, considering the use of my sources needed some