Exercise 5.3

Before completing the exercise, were you a skeptic or believer that disassembling your essay (as described in Ex. 5.3) would be beneficial?

How did you feel about disassembling your essay? Nervous? Excited? Ambivalent? Worried? Determined?

What was the outcome of completing this exercise? Did your essay survive mostly in-tact? Did you discover significant changes are needed? Did you have more paragraphs in your "Keep" or in your "Discard" pile? Did you realize a new way to organize your paragraphs?

Overall, what did you learn from this exercise?

The above questions are refection questions that my professor is having me ask myself in regards to the activity we did in class today. We cut apart out paper into paragraphs and take out the ones that are not directly related to my thesis statement. This helps in narrowing down the paragraphs that are good for my paper and the one's that are wordy or unnecessary.

1.) I have to admit that I was slightly nervous about cutting up my paper because I do not like taking paragraphs out of my paper because it is removing work that I already did. It just made me feel like I was taking apart what I just assembled. However, I realize that this exercise was helpful in making my paper more effective and to the point.


2.) My essay survived mostly in tact except for the occasional sentence structure, long quote and parts of paragraphs. I realized that I need to be more specific in my word choices when it comes to using pronouns. I had more paragraphs in my "keep" pile because my paper took a more direct route as I was writing it. I realized that I do not need a quote in every paragraph to be effective in what I am saying.


3.) Overall, I learned that this exercise can be helpful for any paper and is good to practice with other classes. I also learned that it is important to focus on my thesis statement in order to be effective and impactful in my writing.