So this week we turned in our first draft. Since we didn’t have to meet the requirements of the full seven page paper, we only needed to have three full pages, it was a little easier to write without having a concrete idea of my topic. I basically just wrote about several ideas of what home could be. I don’t think there really is a concrete way to describe what home is, it’s a different definition for everyone but it refers to the same place. My research included really, nothing for this week aside from writing the paper. When I start reading some of my resources I’ll be able to make some of the connections. The draft itself was fairly unorganized, it was a lot of just discussing the idea of home and it’s possible meanings with the occasional story.
We also did peer reviews of our papers, feels like this is the right place to talk about that since it was directly related to our paper. We got into a group of three and read each others paper then gave feedback. I think for some people they made the paper less personal because other people would be reading it. Which I suppose is the right thing to do, don’t put things into the paper you’re not comfortable with other people reading. But that also kind of takes away how personal it could be, maybe getting in the way of some creativity. Aside from that, the feedback was great. I’ve literally never taken a writing class in college, and in high school, might as well say I didn’t go to high school since I wasn’t there half the time. But it was definitely reassuring. My only complaint was we only had an hour to read three papers and discuss each one. We wanted to discuss them a lot more but time fell short.
Having people give me feedback was really useful to me, but I also really enjoyed reading other peoples papers. Reading the papers gave me some insight on what I could consider writing about, if I was on the right track or completely lost. To be a great writer, you probably would benefit from reading other peoples writings. If I were to speak from experience, to be a great programmer you should be reading other peoples code often. Good or bad, you’re learning things. If you can recognize that the code is bad.
Another benefit from the peer review was I got some help on creating a concrete topic idea. I still don’t have one but I think I have a little more direct. Reading the papers helped with that but the reviewers also gave me some feedback. I need to do a little more research I suppose.