I believe that through my writing, I have a good grasp on integrating ideas into my works. A main part of this is avoiding summary of the reference texts used in the essay. As this was a main focus of writing essays throughout high school as well, I have been trained to do this for a while, so when it came to it in class, I had little to no trouble with that. I did need work with text to text work though. In the past, most of the essays that I wrote were based on one reference work that we had to interpret. That changed greatly, though, at the beginning of the semester. When I had to put two texts together, I struggled until Barclay’s Paragraph style, and that helped me put together my papers much better.
Another element that was added to my writing this semester was a greater conversation with the text, and using the text for my ideas. This was present in my writing before, yes, but this semester added to this, with the different stances that you can take with the texts. Before, while I would usually just expand and explain what the reference text was talking about, not I tend to challenge or agree with a condition, integrating my own ideas instead of just explaining the text.
The quality of explanation and introduction of the quotes also improved significantly. In the first paper, I struggled with transitions, and tended to introduce quotes the same way. Through the semester, I began to integrate quotes in a larger variety of ways, and this improved the quality of my work.
