Looking at Examples

In English class today, we looked at four people’s e-portfolios and went over its flaws. Firstly, we saw the mistakes being made most frequently in the “resources” section. This seemed to be due to students not knowing the difference between resources and sources. According to Mr.Paterson, resources are on a bigger scale, so things such as websites with lots of sources or libraries containing many books. On the other hand, sources are the actual news stories and books in the resources. Additionally, another problem we saw is that the teammates didn’t start revising each other’s documents until yesterday in class. This applies to both people who had their first draft done over the holiday, and for people who seemed to have written it in the last couple days of winter break. In the first situation, the teammates who hadn’t accessed the e-portfolio until yesterday is at fault. However, in the latter situation, the person writing the essay is to be blamed because they didn’t give their teammates enough time to look at and improve their writing. From this, I thought that my actions could really have a big affect on teamwork. When working in groups, it’s extremely important to do your part on time so that it makes everyone else’s job easier and everyone can corporate. I’d like to keep this in mind as we make progress in the current project. After all that, we went over the actual writings of the four students. One issue Mr.Paterson pointed out was using personal verbs. Even in the attention grabber where you can often break rules, he suggested avoiding using the word “you”. Instead of using a sentence like “Did you know that ___?”, “Most people don’t know that ___.” is stronger and appeals to the audience more. Then, another issue we saw was what’s called sweeping generalizations. In an academic writing, words like “never” or “always” allows others to prove it wrong easily and quickly, making it a weak essay. To replace it, phrases like “often times” should be used so you can’t be proven wrong and therefore seems like reliable information.