After annotating my first body paragraph of my second draft of paper two, I noticed that I have a lot of key topics in my essay, I tend to use transitions, I like to repeat myself, and I tend to not use pointing terms. I found that there were at least four key topics just in the first body paragraph. They are all related, but looking back, I feel that it might benefit my essay to break this long paragraph into smaller paragraphs to help the reader. Smaller paragraphs will allow the reader to read my essay more easily. I also noticed that I do use transitions. I think this is something my english teachers from high school wanted us to use in our essays and I have continued that in college. I will try to include more transition words in my essay, as it helps the essay flow better. Next, I know I tend to repeat myself in my writing, which is something I am working on. I feel that it is easier to just write what I want, and then go back and condense sentences down that have similar ideas. Then I am able to meet the word count, and get my essay to be more clear to the reader. Lastly, as I was looking at my body paragraph, I did not see a lot of pointing terms, which is a good thing. Not only does it confuse the reader when I add words like “this” or “that”, it also confuses me because sometimes I am not even sure what “this” is relating to. So, I try to rename each word instead of using vague words, which is something I think I did well with in this first body paragraph.
I think I rely on repetition the most, which is something I am trying not to do. I think I like to overwrite to try to get my message across, but sometimes overwriting does more harm than good, because it confuses the reader. By taking a step back and looking at what is useful and what is not, I am able to cut the sentences that are redundant and make my essay flow better. I think the sentences that are hard to follow are the ones that are repetitive. My next step is to take another look at all of my paragraphs and look at what is most repetitive and work until the paragraph is clear.
