Final Project Reflection

Thank you for reading the following letter which reflects on the decisions I made to write and revise two projects for my English 1100 class. These projects represent the work that I have submitted to fulfill two of the four major projects completed in English 1100. These documents, including a revision to writing about a family food tradition and a revision to my final project: Writing for a Public Audience reflect my growing awareness of the choices that I make as I draft and revise. My letter will address three issues about each of these projects: (1) specific aspects of my writing in each project that are effective and the reasons I think they are effective; (2) specific improvements that I made or could make to each project and the strategies

For this project I was required to identify and discuss a family food tradition, examine its cultural evolution, and evaluate its significance among my family. I conducted research on my topic of using ice cream in celebration by using the Joyner Library databases and finding credible articles from this database to include within my project. The next step I took in drafting this project was annotating the articles on the use of ice cream for celebratory purposes and picking out specific quotes to show the origins of using ice cream in celebration. Furthermore, I discussed the origins of my families’ tradition of getting ice cream after a New England Patriots’ football victory with my family, and discovered that the tradition was started when my sister and I were born. I believe that by talking to my family about how our tradition began made the paper more effective in providing details to show why the tradition meant so much to my family and I. Sometimes, it is the little things that matter the most and need to be celebrated. I also believe that I was very effective in using relevant quotes within the paper. I traced back the origins of using ice cream to celebrate accomplishments as well as including quotes that show how ice cream impacts mood positively. This information was crucial in the evolution of my project. Many of the edits I made in revising my initial draft for this project dealt with word choice; changing words like go to went, lose to lost, etc. I also had slight grammatical errors in my initial draft that I revised for my final copy of the project. In addition to implementing these corrections, I rearranged the order of sentences in my initial draft, so that the clarity and concision of my final paper improved. In order to go from my initial draft of the paper to the final project, I had a classmate read over my paper and give me feedback on how to make it better. I