Essay 2

With my essay I plan on using West's article as a framework for finding the identity in a blog. I plan on using this framework to find the identity in my research blog, cagewriter. At first I had a hard time finding a good blog to analyze. Of course I have one now, but I am still a bit unsure about it because I am a little worried about how things may unravel as I get deeper into my essay. Some other problems that I have encountered so far are putting together an adequate thesis to go along with my essay. I wanted to come up with some solid points in my thesis that I could support efficiently. Another issue that I had to deal with was finding enough evidence to support my points. Even though I had some evidence to support my points, I wanted to make sure that I had enough evidence to have a strong argument.

My Article

The article I will be using to help with my research essay is called Students express themselves through blogs, and it is by a woman named Deborah Zhang. As the title suggests, she basically looks at the different ways that students express themselves through blogs. In order to support her argument, she brings up a bunch of cases where students, mostly high school students, use blogs in order to further express themselves to the world. She uses a very broad group of students to show that all of this self-expression through blogging is not limited to a certain group of students, but that all types of students rely on blogging to express themselves. Since the article is about students expressing themselves through blogging, I can use the article to help me see how people may do certain things when blogging. I can use the article as a tool to help identify unique things in blogs that may not be as apparently to me.

Applying West's Article

When looking at West's article or essay, I have a hard time seeing how I would like to apply that to my essay. Seeing how most of West's article is about personal experience and how students would have an easier time learning if they were doing something they enjoyed, it may be hard to relate that to my research essay, especially since my essay is about how I would identify someone through their blog. When looking at the introduction of the article, she does talk about some stuff related to a framework, and that could be used to help me with my essay. The choice that would seem to make the most sense as of now is to use West's article as framework for my essay. Hopefully using the article as a framework for my research essay will give me a chance to use the article and enhance the quality of my essay.

Weblogs and literary response

The article by Kathleen C. West has several points that I find very interesting. The most significant point that I found is about how students will perform well when they are having fun. She mentions this when she talks about how her students enjoyed blogging. She said that her students learned more about their own writing and each other's by blogging. The blogging allowed for the students to be more successful in class. The blogs allowed the students to feel free with what they wrote and they made the students feel like they were getting away with stuff. This shows that if students had fun they wouldn't feel like they were working, thus allowing them to work without feeling like they were going through torturous work.

What I learned from essay 1

After finally finishing the essay, I feel like I've learned plenty about my own writing habits. There were many habits that I noticed that I felt I need to work on. One of these habits is how I like to write different parts of a paper and eventually put it together. The problem with this is when I put it together, the essay does not flow that well and sometimes there are errors throughout the essay. Another one of my problems is how I tend to procrastinate sometimes, and when I come back to my paper I have an even harder time trying to restart on my paper.

They Say, I Say

With all of the work that I have done so far on my research essay, there are some grammatical and structural things I can correct in my essay. When it comes to some of my revisions for my essay, the book “They say, I say” can give me plenty of help. Some of the things on my essay that I can use help from the book on is sentence structure. I have some issues when it comes to writing long sentences. I have difficulty with putting the sentence together properly. In my essay, I have plenty of long sentences, so that portion of the book could help me a lot.