Reflection on Project 1 Draft

This post will be a reflection on the revisions made to my QRG and how the peer review process helped my writing. Without the comments by my peers I would have missed many key ideas for my revision. For my peer revisions, I made comments on the QRGs of both Sam and Ann.

dotmatchbox (at Flickr), "A Kid Drawing or Writing" 2/25/11 via Wikipedia Commons, Creative Commons License

Audience:

• I am trying to reach a very broad and general audience with my QRG, so anyone could possibly understand the current mind control controversy. However, I think I might be appealing more to people with a vague knowledge of neuroscience. For now, classmates are reading my QRG, so I'm hoping my QRG appeals to them.
• The values and expectations of my classmates are higher than my actual audience, since they know how a QRG should and should not be structured, and so they know better if I am effectively getting my point across to them. According to some comments on my QRG, I sometimes use words that my audience might not understand.
• I assume that my audience knows the basics about the human brain (neurons, etc.), but I need to provide information on how the testing was done and how it could possibly lead to mind control.
• For my audience I was going for a generally colloquial language, but I had to add a few words in that are academic and scientific, so that maybe made my QRG seem inconsistent.
• I think I am using a casual tone that suggests it is slightly outlandish to believe in some of the mind control conspiracies that are out there, but I try to remain overall neutral. I think I am consistent in this.

Context:

• I don't feel like I completely meet the formatting or content requirements of this assignment, but I'm not entirely sure why not. For content, after reading through the comments on my QRG I think I definitely could have added more statistics, evidence, and context behind quotes.
• I think I do reflect my own voice while also implementing things I learned in class in my QRG. I at least did not know how to format as I did in my piece before this class, so that is reflected in my QRG, and my tone is a little dramatic which I think represents my voice in the guide.
• I haven't really addressed any grammatical issues in my piece, but I am hoping they are minimal.

Overall, this revision process has really helped me understand my own writing better, what I do well and what I struggle with. The peer reviews made the process even more understandable.