The Home Page ·  The Integral Worm ·  My Resume ·  My Show Car ·  My White Papers ·  Organizations I Belong To

Contact Me ·  FAQ ·  Useful Links

My Professional Writing Papers

Technical Writing ·  Exposition & Argumentation ·  Non-fiction Creative Essays ·  Grammar and Usage of Standard English ·  The Structure of English ·  Analysis of Shakespeare

Advanced Professional Papers ·  The History of the English Language ·  First Internship: Tutoring in a Writing Workshop ·  Second Internship: Advanced Instruction: Tutoring Writing

Visual Literacy Seminar (A First Course in Methodology) ·  Theories of Communication & Technology (A Second Course in Methodology) ·  Language in Society (A Third Course in Methodology)

The Writer's Guild

Journalism

UMBC'S Conservative Newspaper: "The Retriever's Right Eye" ·  UMBC'S University Newspaper: "The Retriever Weekly" ·  Introduction to Journalism ·  Feature Writing ·  Science Writing Papers

Analysis of Literary Language Essays

Analysis of Literary Language Essay 1  ·  Analysis of Literary Language Essay 2 ·  Analysis of Literary Language Essay 2a

Analysis of Literary Language Essay 3 ·  A Brief Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven"

Analysis of my own essays, #1 through #4

         From the first essay I leaned that an informative abstract is not simply repeating the introductory paragraph but the basis of the paper in a nutshell. This error must have been generated from ENGL382 Science Writing where my instructor never cited this problem. Now knowing the difference I won't be making that mistake in the future.

         I have learned to construct an outline of what I want to say. This is a lesson I learned in my first paper in ENGL392, where the paper structure almost became incomprehensible. This was particularly important in this course because the theses were highly focused and in order to remain focused and to prevent going off on tangents, it was necessary to construct an outline.

         All four essays were extremely difficult to write as I had to pain over each sentence to be sure that I was using a minimal number of words to express my point, yet on the other hand, it was important to say exactly what I mean without redundancy in thought.

         The most difficult paper was on James Joyce. This was not because of the complexity of his novel, but because of the complexity of Plato and his theory of "the forms." I was drawing upon what I had learned in Philosophy 101. The professor had brought the material down to the laymen level quite succinctly, but without my notes and relying on pure memory, it seems that I had trouble conveying "the forms." I intend to visit with someone in the Philosophy department in the spring to see if I can strengthen that particular part of paper three.

         As always, I am constantly checking my grammar, spelling, wordiness and repetition of points as they are my weaknesses in English.

         My style of writing is researching complex material, analyzing it, and then presenting my findings in a straightforward conversational style to the average reader. I could bring the language up to a higher level, but the result would probably turn off the average reader. The more one finds themselves referring to a dictionary for the meaning of words in our fast paced society, the more likely the reader is to throw the paper aside and never read it because of all the work involved in trying disseminate what is being said. I work very hard on writing to be read.