Reflection and Drafting Major Projects The work that I am most proud of from this semester is my literacy autobiography,

with my inquiry paper being a close second. I am most proud of my literacy autobiography because this paper was something new and foreign to me; I had never written a paper that connected literacy with a personal experience. Thus, I found writing this paper to be very challenging and difficult at times because it was unfamiliar. I spent a lot of time editing and changing the paper to make it the best it could be, but I still feel that more edits could have been made to cut some length off the paper. Ultimately, I wrote a solid paper that connected my life as a soccer player with literacy. I am very proud of the piece because writing that paper was unlike any other previous writing experience, and I still managed to produce a solid paper. As mentioned before, the inquiry paper is something I take pride in, but the paper itself could use more work on editing and revision. I ran out of time when compiling my research and was unable to dig deeper on some topics, such as the economic motivation behind athletes choosing scholarships and further expanding on recruiting as a force of athletic attrition. I feel that with more time and research I could turn my good research paper into a great inquiry paper. Also, I really enjoyed writing about this topic because it was personal and very prevalent in athletes today; I would be motivated to continue research on the topic because I enjoyed writing the paper to begin with. Adding more logos to the paper would establish more credibility in my writing and further relate this problem of athletic attrition to the audience. Drafting

As far as my drafts, I will first look at my literacy autobiography draft. The draft is absolutely awful, but it was a way for me to get my words and thoughts down on paper. There was no editing done in the draft, and I just wrote whatever came to my mind. Interesting enough, I ended up scrapping the beginning of the piece for a better, more powerful introduction. I did this because the rhetorical questions did not really provoke emotion in the audience like I originally thought they would, so I switched to describing the main scene of the narrative as the opening introduction. The paragraphs are heavily detailed and long because I typed the sentences without much structure; I later went back and put proper breaks and transitions within the paper to give some white space and flow to the paper. However, despite its flaws, this draft was very important to my finished product because this got part of the story down; it is a lot easier to add details to sentences that are already written down than make up new sentences and thoughts. I was just starting to emphasize editing in my writing process at this point in the semester, which is clear by the contrast between my rough draft and final copy of my literacy autobiography. My rough draft for my inquiry project is much better than the rough draft of my literacy autobiography. At this point in the semester, I had really started to emphasize editing as a part of my writing process. I wrote words down, but checked them over as I wrote, which helped make my writing process more efficient. The ideas and details are much more defined and organized in this rough draft, whereas my literacy autobiography was more like a stream of consciousness. In this way, revising the inquiry paper was much less time-consuming than editing the literacy autobiography. My writing process had really become solidified and defined by this time of the semester, which can be seen

by comparing the rough draft and final draft of my inquiry paper. In fact, much of the final copy and the rough draft is the same because I knew the direction I wanted the paper to go; I just had to revise and add some substance to the rough draft to make a strong final inquiry paper. I had a better writing experience with my inquiry paper than my literacy autobiography because my writing process had a strong emphasis on revision and had become more prevalent in my writing. For my multigenre project, there are no rough drafts because the Twitter feed was something I made up and typed into a generator and the Prezi included gathering facts and putting them into a presentation. The letter, in order to establish pathos, was something that came from my heart, and I felt that editing this letter would take away from some of the pathos and emotion built into the letter. Thus, while I did check for spelling and grammar, the letter is essentially the first draft in order to harness that raw emotion and sentiment.