I found that I followed all five functions Tierney and Pearson discuss in “Toward a Composing Model of Reading” while writing my wikipedia article. I also realized my weakness in writing, which is the monitoring step. Sometimes I’ll get hung up on a certain minutiae and can’t snap out of it, if I’m particularly frustrated, I’ll scrap the whole thing and choose a new topic.
Planning was an especially important step in this project, although I don’t see any instance where planning would be a lower priority than something else.. besides maybe safety? Once I chose my topic, I suppose my goals were to write something procedural and intentional. It’s embarrassing for me to admit when I learn things, but after learning about my topic, I had the great feeling you get when you gain a new perspective (or in my case, at least scrape the surface enough to see a different color underneath). I wanted to inculcate, with less negative connotation, that feeling and knowledge to the reader. I don’t really understand procedural, but I wanted the reader to want to get a sense of the topic overall.
Drafting the article was like how I eat a huge thanksgiving meal; bit by bit from piles until it’s all gone. I didn’t need ‘flow’ as much as a narrative needs, I just needed it to be logically cohesive enough to not jar the reader. The first line was the hardest, as wikipedia articles start broad in scope and then narrow down. I had to be choosy with my words as not to contradict or misdefine the concept.
Alignment had a bigger role in this writing project than others. Because wikipedia is an editable, communal text where readers are writers, I didn’t want to put any personal flare in, but I still wanted to secretly push for it’s notability.
I consider drafting and revision about the same thing. In my case, I wrote words for the first line, cut words, added some more, then cut the whole sentence at one point. Was my second, or third try a revision or a draft? The good part about this project being a wikipedia article is you can slack a bit on the revising, because people will do that willingly.
I agree on the point you made about drafting and revising. These two steps, for me at least, go hand-in-hand. I have found that I always tend to reread my previous settings over-and-over again. When I do this I am constantly making changes and corrections. So is this considered my draft? I do not normally make significant changes once my paper is completely finished. By this point I have up to six individual paragraphs revised and hopefully ready to go. However, I do think it's very important to go back and make sure the whole paper flows well and is organized well.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the fact that planning is very important in this project. Like you said, in what project would planning not be important? However, I think that planning might be more important in the case of Wikipedia because if you fail to plan enough, your work has the potential of being erased; and then everything would have been in done in vain. Such things like finding the appropriate resources is so valuable. I know I had great difficulty in this area.
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