Blog #5: My Process and Some Elbow/Belanoff Stuff

Elbow and Belanoff outline a number of different ways to respond to someone’s writing in Summary of Ways of Responding. Although they all seem fairly accessible, I am wondering if they really work when an instructor assigns a Peer Review? The “No Responding: Sharing” option is interesting, but it seems like the reader/writer would know what to listen for when they are reading the paper out loud, so does this strategy work for an ESL student? I’ve used the “Descriptive Responding” option before, but I have found that it’s a double edged sword because students sometimes feel like they’re put on the spot. When the student is receptive to feedback, they’ll be okay, but when they fear criticism, this option seems to further intimidate them (but maybe I did it wrong O_O).

My Writing Process—a bit more thought out

As for my own writing process, I apologize for misunderstanding last week’s blog entry, I usually begin by creating a rough/basic outline of the main points of my discussion. I’ll do one or two bullet points to help me remember any important pieces of analysis that I need to incorporate. 

If I have a prompt, I need to type it out myself—I feel like it helps me process the question better and I delete parts of it when I feel I have address it in my essay. This might be more psychological? I don’t know, maybe I’m a kinetic learner? -insert thinking emoji here-

A lot of the time though, I will write entire paragraphs by hand before I type them up, usually my first draft is composed of different bits of paper with a few sentence scribbled out somewhere (I usually think of these as my nuggets of brilliance, even though most of the time these turn out to be utter b.s). Once I’ve typed up my scribbles, I type up quotes—both primary and secondary sources. I type an arrow (—>) and write my analysis/discussion sentences. Like my initial scribbles, I usually have more than 1 Word Document open as I work in pieces and at some point, I cut and paste everything onto 1 WordDoc. I do a lot of editing as I write, I’ll be honest, I usually think a lot about what I’m going to write, then write the scribbles, but when composing the final draft it’s more like I vomit onto the page the night before. I don’t like free writing, but I use listing quite a bit. I have only recently started clustering, and it’s been okay. I like the bubbles, they make me feel like I’m drawing instead of writing.