Geo-Biography:

Professor Jim gave us the criteria and a very detailed day-by-day schedule of every thing that is due and the exact due dates which made class seem very easy.  However, writing good, quality papers took a tremendous amount of time and effort as his expectations were high.  I did not know what to expect since this was our first graded assignment; but it turned out to not be that bad at all.  Most importantly, I was able to gain a lot of experience as a writer and person: correcting the many grammatical errors (commas, semi-colons, etc.), writing condensed sentences, and even being able to reflect on my adolescent years.  All in all, the geo-biography was the first step on my way to becoming a better author and person!

Learning:

A tremendous amount of work was put in to this first assignment.  It was very challenging to compose the first draft of only two pages due to the fact that i don't particularly like to write about myself.  As a new condition to this college level english class we also had to include a one page meta-commentary at the end too.  This added piece of material is an informational page conisisting of three main parts: who the paper is written for (audience), what style we chose to write the paper (authorship), and what we tried to let our readers understand (aim). Each part is related to one another like siblings, but at the same time they are very different.  The meta-commentary portion of the paper seemed very lame and useless until we actually had to edit other peoples papers.

After I wrote the first draft and met with Lehua, we were then told to expand our geo-biography to four pages.  My heart sank the moment I heard about the expansion plan, and all the energy was sucked out of me too.  But after hearing comments from Cameron, who was my peer editor, and Professor Jim, I found out that the task was not as daunting as it seemed.  During the editing process, the meta-commentary became an invaluable tool to help me understand how this paper was written, and what is trying to be conveyed.  I was also able to see the areas where I tend to make common mistakes and start creating my editing checklist.  This checklist is basically a table where we imput certain grammatical terms that we have a tendency to misuse.  After submitting my final draft, I was not too satisfied with my grade.  There were so many silly mistakes and dumb errors that I decided to redo the essay, and hopefully improve my grade.