In this learning cycle we focused on a variety of writing aspects in order to give us skills to improve our writing. We focused on showing rather than telling. This enhanced our writing because it allowed us to intensify our characters emotions by showing with action rather than telling what they were feeling. Another thing we worked on was maintaining a consistent voice throughout your writing. This gave us the ability to stay true to our character’s feelings and emotions. We were also taught about how to know how to direct our writing to a certain audience. For example, you would not write the same way in a journal as you would for a formal format.
We were given several prompts in order to practice these skills. These prompts that we wrote were shared and edited by a small group of classmates. This was another very large learning aspect for me because I am not used to editing or having other people edit my work. It was perhaps the most difficult part for me. As a class, on padlet, we discussed how to be polite about editing another student’s work and how important it was that our feedback was constructive, not harsh. This helped because it outlined the types of things we should be commenting on and watching for in our own work as well as our peer’s work. I’m only really used to checking other’s work for grammatical errors so on the next learning cycle I would like to work on assessing their work better.
For this summative assessment I chose to rewrite the third prompt. This was a bit difficult for me because writing it originally for the class’s collective storytelling, I had put in what I had believed to already be my best work. However, for the prompt, I did not want to just regurgitate my exact words only in third person rather than first person. This made me disappointed with the outcome of the prompt when I first wrote it. It was a lot less vivid and expressive than when I had written it in the first person perspective; this is why I chose it to expand and improve. I was much more satisfied with my finished piece.