So Many Paragraphs, So Many Skills

In order for one to write a great 5-part-paragraph, it is important that your topic is focused, but not extremely narrow. If your topic is too broad then your paragraph may be confusing or hard to follow, whereas if it is too narrow it may become boring or repetitive. In general I think the majority of papers read in our class were very good, but a lot of them had a few errors (I am no exception). I think the most prevalent weakness amongst our classes' paragraphs were the transitions- on a lot of papers they were very weak (next, finally, etc.) and on others they were missing altogether. There were also a couple of other errors, although none of them were as bad as the transitions. I noticed that on quite a few essays, there was some plot summary in the commentary, and there were also a couple of errors regarding the format the quotes were in (problems with conversations in quotes and lack of page number primarily). Overall, however, I am happy with how our class performed on this assignment and hope we will do similar ones in the future.

I was honestly not very happy with my own paragraph. While other students seemed to think it was alright, and I got an OK grade, I feel as if I didn't put much effort into it. While my concrete details, commentaries and transitions were alright, I feel as if I did a bad job on pretty much everything else. I forgot to put page numbers after quotes, I didn't like my introduction and my conclusion was quite short. I also failed to fill out the outline which was due at the beginning of the project, mainly because I had trouble understanding exactly what we were supposed to do with it (that, and I hate using graphic organizers anyway). I'm hoping we won't have to use many of those in the future, although I understand that this is probably a bit much to hope for!