I found that using the rubric to grade another person’s essay was pretty difficult. I wanted to give some good advice, but I didn’t want to assign a grade just like that or criticize the essay. However, this exercise did help me with familiarizing myself with the rubric and helped me notice some things I could fix in my own essay. I noticed that a lot of us tend to summarize more than analyze, so now we can go back and try to find where we do this and shorten the summaries. I think it was hard to evaluate whether or not a bonus point was awarded because I didn’t know what to look for.
Regarding Grammarly and Hemingway, I thought it was interesting how many of us use a lot of adverbs in our writing or that we write long sentences. This shows how we can all benefit from consulting each other when editing. When it comes to A.I., I think that we just have to trust ourselves in making the decision of whether or not to follow every piece of advice. Although I would feel a little uncomfortable, I would recommend having someone read your paper aloud because we grow so used to our own words in our own internal voice, so having another voice read it can help us catch mistakes.
For sentence length, I found it interesting that professors prefer shorter sentences because they read it in a hurry. I always thought they preferred shorter sentences because they were hard to understand, but apparently it’s not the case for some professors. Passive voice has always been a struggle for me. In my English class last year, my teacher pointed out every instance of passive voice in our papers and always advocated for active voice. When I read academic articles though, they often have passive voice. I’m glad I got some clarity of what different fields of study prefer regarding active or passive voice.
Moving onto The Moth, I thought the discussion about Good Actor vs Bad Actor was interesting because I thought about my experience with class presentations. Whenever someone reads off a slide or script word for word, it doesn’t seem as compelling as when they speak spontaneously. The story about a boss’s murder fantasies really had me smiling a lot, which points to the humor that the narrator utilized to capture the audience’s attention. When we discussed the storytelling project we’ll be doing later, I was excited by the prospect of using iMovie to record our stories because I enjoy using that platform and telling stories verbally since I haven’t done it much yet. But we can also utilize any other avenue of storytelling like at the Book Arts Studio, which gives us other options to fall back on.