As I wrote the second paper for EDLP 715, I looked at the instructor comments from the first assignment. I saw that several of my sentences had too many words in them. I think that I have a problem with not being concise. I also noticed that I kept switching between tenses. This has been a struggle for me in my writing. With the second paper, I decided to try two different strategies. The first strategy was to just read the draft and look for sentences that had too many words. The second strategy was to read the draft looking solely at the word tenses. My goal was to not repeat some of the same mistakes from the first paper. Reviewing the tips listed in the documents Writing in a Scholarly Way and Grammar Tips really helped me to stay on track. I even had both documents displayed while editing my new paper. Using these documents and the two strategies, I found better ways to express my thoughts.
In the second writing assignment, I chose to write about dealing with my school’s renovations as my adaptive challenge. The most surprising revelation was that I was using actual documented strategies to address the challenge. The issues surrounding the renovations were new to me, and I didn’t take the time to figure out how to deal with them. I depended on my instincts. However, after doing the research for this paper, I discovered that several of my coping skills could be defined as specific strategies. I also found several new strategies that I could use in the future to deal with this challenge.
