Essay Improvements

In English class today, we went over a couple more documents and revised them together, as well as talk about the importance of teamwork. First of all, we were assigned to reread our teammates’ drafts and highlight what we didn’t know, which is equivalent to what needs to be cited. In the few documents we looked at as a class, there was still some pieces of information what wasn’t commonly known, but left uncited. In addition, Mr.Paterson found many personal pronouns in a few academic essays, which doesn’t belong in one. Since this is something we’ve gone over multiple times, he reminded us to not make the same mistakes as we continue writing up our academic essays. One good part that was pointed out, was that someone had written about their personal experience. It was a strong claim, however, the teacher mentioned that it was grammarly incorrect. I’d like to make sure to read my teammates’ writings carefully and thoroughly so that the same doesn’t happen to my group members. Lastly, we were also given time to perfect our own writing and add citations towards the end of class. I came across the problem of citing a piece of information by a research center that I found from a different newspaper article. When I asked Mr.Paterson about how to do in-text citations properly in this situation, he taught me that it should be like this; ( Last name of original resource’s author, page # cited from last name of newspaper article author, n.p.) From this, I learned that if your source doesn’t have page numbers, for example, an online TIMES newspaper article, you can use “n.p.”. However, research reports and such usually has a pdf version available, especially if it’s a proper research center. If you can find it, you should take a look at the pdf and write down the page number of where the information comes from in the pdf. Also, I learned from this that it’s important to credit the original source, so you should always try to look for it if possible. With these new pieces of information and writing tips, I’d like to better my academic essay and continue to leave helpful feedback on my team members’ e-portfolio documents.