Reflection on Project 2 Draft

Does a movie critic ever get critiqued?  It’s exciting to be the critic, as I got to experience while peer reviewing Jovanka’s draft and Zayla’s draft of Project 2.  Unfortunately, it’s not as thrilling to be critiqued, but let’s take a look at the “movie review” for my draft of the rhetorical analysis.

Manske, Magnus. "Chicago Theatre Sign" 02/04/2009 via Wikimedia. 
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported Licence.

My thesis is easily identifiable and points to specifics in the author’s rhetoric.  The one area I can improve on in my thesis is making sure it completely encompasses my essay’s argument.  These additions could be including the author’s purpose or how the author uses word choice.  However, my thesis has a good balance of broadness and specificity that I do not want to disturb.

My paper has a strong overall organization with guiding topic sentences.  My main improvement will be the organization within the paragraph itself.  My points of analysis are all present, but my peers sometimes had read a paragraph twice to get the full meaning.  By rearranging some of the sentence structures, I can better guide my readers to reach the same conclusions as me.

One of the strengths of my paper lied in deeper insight into the author’s rhetoric.  My paper ties the different strategies together by relating them to how they affect the author’s credibility.  However, my area of improvement will be the overall effect each piece creates.  I have to work on clearly stating what was effective, what wasn’t, and how two different strategies worked together (or didn’t).  There was confusion on whether two of the points I was making contradicted each other; thus, I need to explain how the strategies do oppose but do not contradict.

Another improvement point in my paper is to add more explanation.  Although some of my paragraphs do this effectively, other paragraphs are lacking.  This is an easier fix, as the analysis is there, I just need to make sure my reader understands how I reached these conclusions.  Including quotes seemed to be an effective way of making sure I was pinpointing specific examples.

My conclusion is the weakest point of my paper.  It lacked direction and purpose right from the start and only became more confusing from there.  I need to review the rubric and choose a specific purpose for my conclusion that I think would be most effective for my audience.  Once I have this direction, my conclusion will leave the reader with food for thought.