Thlog: Week 6

On Monday morning we began with another couple of Z’s useful writing tips. The first tip we received was to use “notes to self” with insert comments in a paper. I already do this, but it really helps me revisit parts of my writing that may need touch-ups or extra information. It can be grammatical, organization, punctuation — anything! I LOVE Z’s second writing tip to look at visuals of the writing topic to assist with ideas and getting started. I’ve never heard of anyone doing this before, but I actually tried it with my WP2, and it gave me some super ideas I never would have thought of. The third writing tip of the week I was most impressed with was using synonyms of says. As a class we attempted to smash out as many synonyms of the verb says as we could. We came up with many, including explain, describes, states, advocates and argues. This variation of words makes writing so much more appealing. 

Parallelism was an interesting, new term (in writing specifically) introduced to me this week. It’s not something I usually notice in a piece, but it subconsciously helps to make the writing more appealing. The use of similarity of structure in a pair or series of related words, phrases, or clauses is called parallel structure. For instance: winning, implementing, and improving all use present tense with the suffix ‘ing’. But parallelism isn’t just with words or phrases, it can also be relative to the entire formatting and structure of a piece — for instance we analyzed Rockin Robin’s resume. The location of each set of information on the page was in the exact same position, and each subheading was present for every subject. Small snippets of parallelism was present in the resume, without us really noticing prior to the investigation. In Charlie Cheesecake’s resume, there were multiple things that needed to be changed because of the style resumes often follow. For instance, the class decided that resumes need to be in black and white, or very bland colors. However, Charlie Cheesecake’s resume had color splashed all over; coming off as very unprofessional. 

I’ve just started writing my WP2 draft, so I am looking forward to writing it and peer reviewing on Wednesday!