I began Saturday’s second writing class wondering what our new writing endeavor would be. When we were given the reading assignment and questions to be answered from Bolman and Deal, I felt at ease at first. Then after realizing I had to read and answer the questions critically, I found myself not staying focused on the task at hand. I reread the text a couple of times, and realized I really had to think before answering the questions. We had a good group discussion and went over the answers to the questions, and we were all on target.
The best part of Saturday is when we had our writing conferences with Dr. Church and Dr. Sokol. I received valuable feedback on the strong points of my writing, and how to identify my goal areas for improvement. APA style is very complicated in some aspects and very straight forward in other ways. Properly citing and quoting sources is where I need to concentrate my attention.
While we were waiting for our individual conferences, we were working on our critical analysis assignment. Several of us were “fuzzy” on what we needed to do. When I initially received the assignment with an analytical frame to guide us through the assignment I felt fine about it. Then when it was explained not to follow the analytical frame questions in the order that they were written, I started to feel insecure in what I was doing. I like to have a precise idea in my head of how I am going to sequentially plan my paper. The cohort worked well together again to tackle the assignment. We helped each other refine our adaptive challenge topic, and we discussed possible ways to format the paper.
I feel an anchor paper would have been very beneficial to help us better understand the format and the flow of the paper assigned. However, after asking questions and having group discussions about it, I had a better understanding of the assignment. I look forward to see how my writing style can continue to grow even when assignments are out of my comfort zone.
