Exercise 5.3

I am still reading through The Curious Researcher by Bruce Ballenger for my English Composition class.  Ballenger puts exercises in his book to help with the writing process.  The exercise my teacher assigned to us today was very different from anything I have ever done.  We all brought scissors and a copy of our rough draft to class.  We cut each paragraph out of our paper and missed the paragraphs up so that they were in a different order.  We looked at each paragraph and had to decide if it was on-topic with our thesis.  If a paragraph was not, we stuck it in the "reject" pile.  We had a good and bad pile at the end of this step.  Then, we took another step and had to identify if the paragraph was giving evidence, if it was explaining something, if it was illustrating something, if it was of importance, or if it was a question.  For homework tonight our teacher had us take each piece of paper with a paragraph on it and experiment with the order and structure of the paragraphs in the essay.  The first time I rearranged the paragraphs it ended up looking a lot like my the order of my original rough draft.  To me, it looked good, but there was gaps.  I cut out some transition sentences during class, so when I went to put it back together my paper sounded a little choppy.  I had my introduction first, and then I went right into stating facts.  I learned from the first time that I need to tell a story in my introduction to draw my reader in.  I had a lot of facts that were related to my thesis, but I need to go back and tie a story throughout my paper to make it more interesting.  The second time I went back and restructured my essay it looked a lot different.  I still had my introduction first, but I presented my issue a little more before I started to jump into facts and statistics.  I thought that this structure looked a little better.  I think it is important to introduce and draw your reader in before you start throwing facts out.  I learned from this second time around that I need to be more clear and separate my own voice more.  I need to put my facts and statistics in throughout my voice instead of separating them.  Overall, I thought this process helped to re-see my essay in a whole new way.  I felt like I was in the shoes of my readers.  I really critiqued my paper.  I saw what I need to change and why I need to change it.  I was very happy with the results that I received by doing this exercise.  I am going to change a lot of things in my paper now.