Thlog week 6

Since WP2 draft is on the horizon, during this week, we learnt very hard to prepare ourselves for this upcoming new challenge. We went over various topics and had very fun activities. Among them, I found three ones very helpful to me.

The first one is “replacing says”. Oftentimes, I was struggling with finding another word substituting word says. I realized that the lack of diversity of word choice will negatively affect the quality of my writing and undermine the interest of the reader to read. If I always use word says or argues to introduce a quote, it will definitely cause the reader to doubt my intelligence and therefore damage the rhetoric of my writing. But fortunately, thanks to this activity, I have learnt a great number of words that can express the same meaning of say.

“Using brackets” permanently answers a long standing question in my mind—why people use brackets in a quote?  I learnt that brackets can be used in a quotation to modify words and add context. I think to properly and actively use brackets in our quotes can improve the efficiency of using resources. In WP2, we are going to quote many things, and using brackets to adjust a quote will definitely contribute to a stronger argument and analysis.

Last but not the least, I love to review Sandy’s paper. She wrote a strong WP2 paper and reading it gave me many clues about how to write my own WP2. Reviewing her paper was a very good practice on analyzing moves and style. Upon spotting her moves, I started to think why she chose it and its effect. By this contemplation, I had a better understanding on what is a move and found that authorial moves are related to conventions. Analyzing the relationship between conventions and moves sounds very interesting. Also, her article shows some flaws that we might have in our own piece as well, such as lack of direct textual evidence. It is good to notice these problems ahead so that we can avoid them in our WP2s.