1. One thing that I know I've improved on is not using sledgehammer words. I use to have a hard time with this. I still use it in my physical speech, which I'm trying to get rid of, but I know I've tried to take it out of my writing. It's one of those words that fill up exaggeration. Instead of saying a simple sentence like, "I want some ice cream," I've made a habit of saying, "I really want some ice cream."

An example of my use of sledgehammer words in my previous writing was in my Great Gatsby essay. Looking back on it, I liked to add quite a bit of "really's" in my paper. When I read through it, I found sentences like, "There wasn't really a creative way of becoming rich, no individualism or personality in achievement, thus branding the American Dream as uncreative and hollow," and "Even with his success, he never really made close friends." I think this was from my final draft too, the one I turned in to be graded.

In Ampersand, I kept an eye out for the sledgehammer words in my essay. When it came to this project, I had a lot of rough drafts. As a matter of fact, here is a screen shot of the folder where I kept all of my Ampersand related files.

When it came to my first draft, I just wrote out all my ideas. Instinctively, I used the word really quite a bit and that draft looked nothing like my current. I was solely focused on, "Internship was a really good experience for me." which was lacking in the professional and specific department. When I was writing the actual rough draft I was going to turn in, I wrote something like, "Not really wanting to accomplish work."

I was still working out through my own ideas. Instead of using the sentence, I used the idea and compared it to my own experience. I felt strong about this idea and it didn't really cut it as one sentence. If I had kept the sentence, I would've just replaced the word "really" with "immensely" or some other longer looking sledgehammer word. In my third draft, I wrote, "There is really only one way to pass this step." which was later edited out due to irrelevance. In the end, I accomplished my final Ampersand piece with no "really's" at all. This is one of the improvements that I made that I was particularly proud of.

2. I would personally like to improve my use of the loop. The first time I used it was... I'm not sure actually. I did use a bit of it before we even learned about it. It tried doing it for my American Icons project. The only problem with that was that it was unclear. It was explaining how when critiquing your art, you get better and better. In the beginning, I mentioned things about a sketch. Then near the end, I mention a sketch again, but skew it in the direction of a better sketch. However, that was unclear.

The second time I used the loop was in my Great Gatsby Essay. This one was a little tricky though. In the first paragraph, I was talking about how, "the American Dream was typically about wealth, titles, and showmanship." In the second to last paragraph, I tried linking back to that idea why evaluating it further. I said, "Since money was the language of society, Gatsby used money to talk to society." I attempted to use the loop, but at that point, I was still confused about how it worked. I'll be honest, I had no idea how to use it on the first essay I wrote using that method. I remember asking Randy a lot of questions since I was trying to link the loop back to math, but it didn't work out so well. I wasn't able to rate my thoughts by the connections I made, if that makes any sense. My main problem was that my ideas were all over the place because I made connections too soon or too late. Instead of making a loop, I sort of make a wave right now. I suppose that's just how I think about things. I hope to improve on this for the future.