Something extremely helpful that I learned this week on monday was the concept of the reverse outline. The first time I have ever heard of such a thing was when it was first brought up in class. I thought to myself “I don’t usually use outlines so why would I use a reverse outline?” It turns out, when Zack made us use them on our own papers I found several connective issues with my paper and found that there were certain things I needed to add to make it flow better, and that I needed to separate some topics into their own paragraphs. This also helped because it helped me adjust my paper so that I accomplished what I set out to do. The most important thing that the reverse outline helped me with was my thesis. My thesis wasn’t bad but I made some points and arguments in my paper that wouldn't have been relevant if I didn't adjust my thesis. I like the reverse outline because it helped me mold my paper into something better than it ever could have been without viewing it at this angle.
Another activity we did on monday was the highlighting activity. This activity helped me see if my claims were backed by the text and then to see if I provided analysis on my citations. This activity also saved me because I forgot to include aspects from the course reader which is a significant part of my paper grade. I noticed that when I quoted Dirk and then re read my paper, it appeared stronger because I used Dirk-an established writer and thinker-to validate my claims and analysis.
In today’s class (wednesday) we dissected the conventions of the three disciplines of the university- hard science, soft/social science, and the humanities-and assigned subjects into one of the three categories based on their own conventions. It was interesting to see how people categorized different subjects and what their arguments for their choices were. The ones that were obvious were the hard sciences like physics chem and bio under hard science and philosophy under humanities, but there were also some subjects that were harder to classify because they have characteristics of both. For example, psychology was labeled as a hard science by some and a hard science by others because it was based on studies and labs and had some hard science components to it, but it also had a social science element to it because it is the study of human reaction and interaction and how we work and think.
Another activity we did in class that I found particularly interesting was the murder activity. Several different groups each got a genre that they had to use the given information to write what they were given. For example there were police reports, letters, emails to parking patrons and so forth. It was interesting because even though we all had the same base information, our purpose and sometimes our audience were different and it was easy for the most part to guess what each group was supposed to be mimicking. After reading up on what WP2 is about, I can see how this activity was crucial and will go a long way into how I think about and write WP2.
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