When I started to revise my paper, I looked over the comments I received as a benchmark for what I should change. Coincidentally, what needed the most work was my incorporation of evidence. I took the ideas we discussed last class about how to lead up to and away from evidence and applied it to my paper. Here is an example:
Old Paper: Given that the video acts as a hoax perpetuating mechanism, the creator of the video applies standard techniques found in sports reporting to express T’eo’s story in a credible and authoritative way. Like other sports documentaries, the video talks about the impact of an outside event, the death of T’eo’s girlfriend, on his play. It cites his statistics and specific plays to follow the basic formula for an interesting sports report, making the video appear to contain authentic information. In the video, T’eo expresses Lennay’s impact on him when he says, “I literally felt the wind after every play I made. I said that’s for you”. While his actions benefited from the death of Lennay, she still tricked him into feeling and acting a certain way while he played football.
New Paper: Given that the video acts as a hoax perpetuating mechanism, the creator of the video applies standard techniques found in sports reporting to express T’eo’s story in a credible and authoritative way. Like other sports documentaries, the video talks about the impact of an outside event, the death of T’eo’s girlfriend, on his play. It cites his statistics and specific plays to follow the basic formula for an interesting sports report, making the video appear to contain authentic information. In the video, T’eo expresses Lennay’s impact on him when he says, “I literally felt the wind after every play I made. I said that’s for you” (Wojciechowski). He benefited from Lennay’s death despite her tricking him into feeling and acting a certain way while he played football.
The new version flows better while still incorporating a strong argument. I plan to expand my skills on the research paper by applying effective quote integration throughout the entire essay.
Good focus on evidence here, Eli. It would be helpful to get more of an analysis of the changes that you made–how or why, specifically, does it flow better? The same principles that we talked about in terms of thoroughly examining evidence apply to talking about your own writing, too!
The in-text citation is looking good, but other than that the only change I see is a few words after the quote. I agree that it’s stronger, but I think you could have gone further: maybe calling out particular words or images from the quote that you can talk about and tie to your topic sentence. You are giving this as evidence that the video was using standard sports techniques, so how could you pull that in to your analysis of this quote? What is typical about it? Similarly, leading up to the quote, we have a sentence about statistics. How could you transition from that to this quote about his motivation?