Before college I was always the type of person to use EasyBib for all of my citations in any class. However, now that I’ve been able to have The Little Seagull on hand to help me create citations it has been much easier doing them on my own. I also feel a lot more confident in adding my citations to the end of my essay since I know that since I did them all myself they are done correctly. Many times when it’s done online they can come out incorrectly, or be missing pieces of important information.
I also have seen myself correcting sentence level errors a lot while I’m rereading my paper just out of habit. While I write my rough draft I just let myself type whatever comes to mind and more often than not this results in a lot of small mistakes. However, when I read over my rough draft out loud or just to see if what I wrote makes sense, I tend to correct any that I see. Grammatical errors are the one thing that I try to pick out the most because I’m always correcting others when they have an error, so I try to limit the amount that I have in my paper as best as I can. However sometimes I miss one or two.
One mistake that I made in my final draft of my last essay was forgetting to cite Victoria and Kendall at any point in their individual interviews. All of my writing about them was summary so since I didn’t have any direct quotes I forgot to include in text citations. During my revision I made a note to add the citations at a few points but forgot to do it before submitting.
As far as sentence level errors such as grammar and punctuation I was missing a few commas in my final draft of my essay. However, one way that I was able to improve in this area is by making my sentences more clear. Some of my sentences in my first draft when read out loud sounded like they jumbled over each other making it harder to read. However, once I was able to take out any unnecessary words and make my point more clear it was much easier to read and had a nice flow.
Some Examples…
Rough Draft : California’s new decision to allow students to profit from their college sports is finally allowing athletes to be fairly compensated for all the time and effort that they put in every day.
Final : California’s decision to allow students to profit from their college sports allows athletes to be fairly compensated for the effort that they put in every day.
Rough Draft : This is important to note because it’s not being made a requirement that each student athlete gets their fair share. Instead they are giving them the opportunity to choose to make money by hiring an agent and using their name and likeness on their own time.
Final : This is important to note because rather than being made a requirement, the new law is trying to make being paid an option for students.
