Looking back from the first draft to the final draft of my social media essay, I made severe changes to the integration of sources aspect. I noticed in my first draft that I mainly included quotes for my evidence and there was no summary or paraphrasing at all. With the final draft, I made sure to balance out the methods of source integration. After revising it, I believe there is a fair share of quotes, summary, and paraphrasing worked into the essay. I reread the chapters from They Say, I Say to make sure I was properly applying each method to my work. I also looked over Barclay’s Formula as a template for how to set up my body paragraphs.
This was different from all my other essays I’ve written in the past because, for the most part, my essays never had a balance of source integration. I used to always rely on quotations to serve as proper evidence for my work. But now that I’ve become more comfortable with summary and paraphrasing, its become easier to integrate into my work.
Although I hoped it would, this prewriting activity didn’t really help all that much in reconstructing my essay. This is when I look back though. At the time, it helped for the argument I had going on but after I redid my entire essay (more or less) it was of little use to me. I also didn’t find the sticky notes method very helpful when it came to writing down our claims because at that point I had no idea what to write about so I had no idea where to begin.
