Learning Outcome 1: While writing my rough draft for my second essay about the incorporation of art into science, I had a difficult time organizing my rough draft. At first I had taken a very broad argument while trying to argue many points into one essay.  For example, I begin my thesis by saying “In order to expand our answers on how the brain works, the surreal nature of physics, or better understand society as a whole, we need to take the new approach of integrating art into all areas of laboratories, school systems, and society. ” I tried to place many topics into one sentence. This led to an unclear and confusing argument. I decided that narrowing my sentences and changing the words throughout my body paragraphs would help but it didn’t change my complex argument, only the sentences. As stated in the article “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers,” “The students have strategies for handling words and phrases . . . . What they lack, however, is a set of strategies that help them identify the ‘something larger’ that they sensed was wrong and work from there” (Sommers). In order to revise my argument the correct way, I decided to start by changing my thesis as this was the beginning of my argument. Just as Sommers claimed, when I tried changing the words I used within my paragraphs, this only avoided the main issue of my essay: the thesis. The thesis was what I need to change in order to start from the beginning and narrow my argument as I continued to write. My corrected thesis took out a lot of the topics in my old one and focused more on the brain as I changed it to, “Integrating art into school systems, laboratories, and society will further develop the understanding of the human brain.”

Learning Outcome 2: 

I used the articles we were required to use as sources to back up my argument on how art should be integrated into our everyday lives for a better understanding of the human brain. In my first body paragraph which talked about integrating art into school systems to raise young scientists I used a quote from Yo-Yo Ma’s essay that stated, “STEAM will help us get there by resolving the education problem. Children will then go to school because it is a passion and a privilege, not a requirement” (2). This backed up my argument that art is a creative way for kids to enjoy school and not just solely focus on science. This will also allow them to focus in school and hopefully learn the creativity of art but also the complexity of science for the benefit of the future, whether they become scientists or not. I also used a quote from Lehrer’s essay in my next paragraph on art integrated into laboratories. I used the quote, “Bohr’s discerning conviction was that the invisible world of the electron was essentially a cubist world” (1). I explained this quote with my own words by saying, “These unique techniques are creative and will only help approach science in a new way to continue discovering the world around us and within us. As shown by Bohr’s work, a scientist who seeks a new approach and engages with art gains an even stronger scientific view.” These quotes help back up my main argument that science and art need to be used together in order to understand new, complex ideas. 

Learning Outcomes 3:  My essay shows my ability to source using MLA guidelines as I use quotes from the essays we read followed by in-text citations. For example: Lehrer claims, “Bohr’s discerning conviction was that the invisible world of the electron was essentially a cubist world” (1).  I used the page number that the quote was found on because it was an essay but the last name of the author was not needed since I used his last name to introduce the quote. I continued to do this with both essays by Lehrer and Yo-Yo Ma. I did put the author’s last name in parenthesis if I had not used their name. My MLA citation page consisted of the two essays in the correct format and two websites that I had quoted. I used the SeaGull handbook to correctly cite these pieces of work. The essay citation looked like: Author of essay, the name of the essay, the name of the collection, the editor of the collection, the publication information, and the page number(s) of the essay. The website citation looked like: Last, First M. “Article Title.” Website Title. Website Publisher, Date Month Year Published.

Learning Outcome 4: Peer-reviewing practice not only allowed me to see mistakes in my peer’s writing but in my own. It is difficult to see mistakes in my own writing so practicing with a peer’s helps keep my eyes open for my own mistakes. While reviewing my peer’s work I was able to see local and global mistakes while giving them feedback on how to fix them. For example, one local correction that I made was replacing the first or with a comma in the sentence, “Throughout history, humans were allured to beauty, whether it may be in people’s faces or paintings or landscapes.” I also made a couple comments on rewording sentences along with examples so that they sounded more clear to reader. For example, I told my peer to change the sentence, “Sunrise is the beginning of a new day with new opportunities. When I see it, it gives me a sense of warmth, even in the winter, and the feeling of it really is a ‘good morning’ to “The sun gives me a sense of warmth when I see it and even in the winter when there is less sun I get the feeling of a new day.” This way the sentence flows better. A global revision that I made as a comment was adding a transition sentence to the end of my peer’s introduction as it would allow their argument to flow into the first body paragraph.