Com156 - Week 6 Discussion Questions

COM/156 - UNIVERSITY COMPOSITION AND COMMUNICATION II
Week 6 Discussion Questions

Discussion Question 1
It is important that an essay not be a series of quotes or paraphrased material; one’s own analysis must be part of the essay. How can you create a balance between your own analysis and the source material?

To assure you are are not using too much paraphrasing and referencing quoted material, you should use "Revision: Cohesion" as stated on pp 363 in our text. Asking these specific questions will help you look through your essay very carefully to prevent mistakes such as; assuring information is relevant to the topic, transitions from paragraphs to new paragraphs as well as assuring you are properly referencing quoted material. Revision Cohesion helps you feel confident you have done your due diligence by assuring everything fits together well and makes sense. I would say that using the plagiarism checker would be another way to determine if you have a good balance between using your resource and your study material. When taking notes, I tend to write many things down. The problem is I would actually write it down very close to what I read. Then there are times I would paraphrase my notes, and then re-paraphrase them when I put them on my work. Then when I re-paraphrase sometimes, it can come close to the original text. This is a bad habit I'm trying to break so going forward, I'm just going to use the plagiarism checker to assure I'm not coming too close to what I'm reading in the text.

Discussion Question 4
What do you think are the two most common mistakes a writer might make that could cause his or her writing to be ineffective for readers? What steps might you take to avoid these mistakes?

One common mistake that people make when developing their essays is using the wrong word for the wrong meaning. These words are pronounced the same, but the spelling is different and they have different meanings. These are called homographs and they could be detrimental to your effectiveness and your credibility to the reader. An example would be something like this; “He read his essay allowed.” Obviously, it should be “aloud” meaning, that others could hear him. Instead, it has allowed meaning he was granted permission. The sentence I used as an example is also the way you can avoid making this error. There is a good chance the reader would catch this if they determine the meaning does not fit with the content, but by this time, you may have lost them due to confusion or credibility.
The other mistake I see that can lead to an ineffective essay is over using words. If I were trying to be persuasive and kept using the word really, it would eventually lose its effectiveness because of it being repeated. This is when your creative writing skills take over and develop different ways to get your point across in the most compelling way. Using a Revision Cohesion list or a word count tool will help you determine how many times you are using repeated words. For those keeping track, I used “the,” twelve times answering this discussion question.