self reflection paper

Writing in the 21st century has become increasingly important to the overall success of professionals and recent college graduates. Read the THREE articles that follow the instructions. After reading the articles, submit a 2 page paper (800+ words) outlining how you plan to maintain or continue your growth as a writer. In addition, discuss how refining your writing skills can essentially become a major part of your career or profession. Finally, include your understanding of the article entitled “ The Future of Self-Improvement….”and how “Grit” can be applied to your current development as a writer into your chosen career.

The length of the paper is required and you must provide an in depth explanation of each aspect of your paper. Finally, the paper must be submitted in the following format:

MLA FORMAT

Criterion	Standard
Responsiveness to Topic Score / 15	15 – clearly addresses the topic and responds effectively to all aspects of the assignment; 12 – clearly address the topic, but may respond to some aspects of the assignment more effectively than others 8 – addresses the topic, but may slight some aspects of the topic 5– indicates confusion about the topic or neglects important aspects of the assignment 2 – suggests an inability to comprehend the assignment or to respond meaningfully to the topic
Communication of Ideas Score / 20	20 – explores the issues showing thorough comprehension of the text; goes beyond the obvious or class discussion 17 – shows some depth and complexity of thought 10 – may treat the topic simplistically or repetitively; doesn’t demonstrate sufficient comprehension of the text 7 – lacks focus, demonstrates confused or simplistic thinking, or fails to communicate ideas 4 – is unfocused, illogical, incoherent or disorganized
Organization Score / 20	20 – is coherently organized, with ideas supported by apt reasons 17 – is well organized and developed with appropriate reasons and examples 10 – is adequately organized and developed, generally supporting ideas with reasons and examples 7 – is poorly organized and/or undeveloped; lacks support from the text 4 – is undeveloped; provides little or no relevant support
Control of Mechanics, Sentence Structure, Grammar, Spelling Score / 20	20– is generally free from errors in mechanics, usage, and sentence structure 17 – may have a few errors in mechanics, usage, and sentence structure 10 – may have some errors, but generally demonstrates control of mechanics, usage, and sentence structure 7 – is marred by an accumulation of errors in mechanics, usage, and sentence structure 4 – has serious and persistent errors in word choice, mechanics, usage, and sentence structure
Word Count (750-800) 1 ½-2 Pages Score / 5	10 Point Deduction- Not Presenting a Visual Aid (Approved Visual Aids…PowerPoint Presentations, Posters, Appropriate Objects, Videos, Music, etc. SUBMIT REFLECTION PAPER BY Sunday, June 23rd BY 11:59 PM VIA CANVAS

21st Century Writing and Oral Presentation Oral Presentation Delivered_Monday June 24th

Students are expected to display some type of visual aid to accompany the paper and be able to articulate their premise or belief in relation to the importance of writing. Each student is required to present his/her premise and share a personal outlook with the class regarding the importance of writing within various professions. Each student will receive 3-4 minutes to deliver oral presentation.

Grading Rubric Category I > Oral Presentation 20%

Categories	Possible Points	Points Earned
Eye Contact Holds attention of entire audience with the use of direct eye contact, seldom looking at notes.	4
Elocution Demonstrate a clear voice and correct, precise pronunciation of terms so that all audience members can hear presentation.	4
Subject Knowledge Demonstrate a complete knowledge by thoroughly explaining the subject matter and providing realistic examples.	4
Organization Present information in a logical, interesting sequence which audience can follow.	4
Mechanics Presentation has no grammatical errors	4

Article #1

“B-Schools Seem to Downplay Writing Skills”

US News

One b-school professor calls her students’ essay writing skills ‘horrendous’ and ‘painful.’

By Menachem Wecker

July 11, 2012

Some b-schools seem to suggest they’re not too concerned about how much red ink is required to edit students’ writing.

In a business world where executives' E-mails increasingly conclude with a caveat that the message was sent from a BlackBerry, iPhone, or Android, and a customized footer apologizing for any typos, writing skills appear to be an anachronism.

Deans and professors at business schools have long complained about students' poor writing skills, but some MBA admissions experts suggest that b-schools are now downplaying the importance of solid written communications skills.

Both Harvard Business School and Stanford University's Graduate School of Business trimmed the number and length of their required application essays. The move was to prepare students for the "real world," where they will increasingly need to write concisely, says Dee Leopold, Harvard's managing director of MBA admissions and financial aid.

"That's what most of my life is like, and I'm sure that that's not unreflective of the real world," she says.

But Jane LeClair, the dean of the School of Business & Technology at Excelsior College, in Albany, N.Y., says Harvard's and Stanford's application changes may send the "wrong message" to applicants. "It may indicate to them that writing is decreasing in importance," LeClair says.

Students often bring "bad habits" from E-mailing, text messaging, and social media use to the classroom and to their jobs, which is why schools such as Excelsior are adding writing programs to their curricula, LeClair says.

But those schools may be the exceptions to the rule, according to Catharine Curran, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Massachusetts—Dartmouth's Charlton College of Business.

"I can tell you in two words: functionally illiterate," says Curran, who has taught MBA and college students for 14 years. "The student writing is painful."

Not only are the English skills of Curran's international students "horrendous," she says, it's even tough to grade the papers of her American students.

"Many of the international students tell me that they seek help, but there is no help for MBA students with writing," she says. "This leads some to turn to bad behavior—either plagiarism or buying papers online, or hiring a student to write their papers for them."

Source:

Wecker, Menachem. "B-Schools Seem to Downplay Writing Skills." (2012): n. pag.Www.usanews.com. USANews, 11 July 2012. Web. 4 Nov. 2012. <http://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/top-business- schools/articles/2012/07/11/b-schools-seem-to-downplay-writing-skills>.

Article #2

We Must Overhaul College Writing

Here's a not so modest proposal that will turn American students from poor writers into good ones. By Murray Sperber

June 21, 2011

The poor writing of many American college students is finally getting the attention it deserves.

Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s much-discussed book Academically Adrift shows that most students don’t do much writing. The number of pages students have to write in most courses is depressingly low, but the problem, in my view, is much less one of quantity than of quality.

In trying to ascertain why so many graduate students have major writing problems, I began a pilot study with survey questions about the quantity of their writing in undergraduate courses. Often, they answered that they’d written well over 20 pages in individual courses and a total of over 100 pages per semester.

Yet, they still had difficulty mounting a logical argument, and had even more difficulty writing out that argument in coherent paragraph form. They had serious problems writing clear sentences; often they were addicted to passive constructions, believing that they sound “more academic.” When I asked them to unravel a sentence and explain who was doing what to whom in it, i.e., what the subject, verb, and object were, they looked at me as if I had arrived from another galaxy to torture them.

For my revised survey, I still ask about quantity but my key questions are now: “How many comments did the instructor who assigned the paper put on it?” And: “Please describe the comments that the instructor put on the paper.” The answers are revealing--the vast majority of students indicate that the instructor (in upper division courses, usually of professorial rank) wrote but a sentence on the last page, often something like, “An insightful view of this subject,” grading it “A.”

(In today’s grade-inflated academy, even an “A-“ would require some justification in writing; a “B” would necessitate at least a paragraph or two of explanation; and a “C” or below could trigger a legal brief to ward off a potential lawsuit.)

Why do faculty members respond so tersely to student writing? Beyond wanting to avoid the work of justifying below A- grades, the reasons probably connect to the evolution of English composition instruction during the last two generations. We’ve gone from traditional grammar-based pedagogy to what is usually termed “holistic writing,” i.e., trying to get students to grasp the language as a whole rather than in its grammatical parts.

Thus, many faculty members justify their indifference to dreadful student writing by saying that when reading a paper, they mainly want to ascertain whether the student understands the ideas in the course and makes good use of them. Content alone matters, not how well the student has expressed it.

Nonsense. If a student doesn’t clearly express ideas so the reader can easily comprehend them, then it’s impossible to judge whether the student really understands the ideas or not.

Poor student writing is a terrible problem and I offer the following recommendations based on my 40 years of teaching composition.

Many students need to be taught the basic concepts of English composition. Start with words; students often insert totally inappropriate polysyllabic words when common, shorter ones would work much better. Move on to sentences: Rule Number 1: avoid passive constructions whenever possible. Then on to paragraphs, followed by one-page papers, and finally, 3-to-5 page papers. (Students should have learned those skills in middle and high school but most have not; colleges and universities must teach them.)

Most of all, instructors must line-edit student work. Yes, line-editing is very labor-intensive, but there is no shortcut for this key function.

Composition instructors should also stress rewriting; students must correct and resubmit all work that the instructor has line-edited. By the end of the semester, students may be able to revise on their own, but instructors should always ask for drafts of a paper—if nothing else, it short-circuits plagiarism.

Learning to write is not a mystical process; in fact, it is quite simple. Someone who knows more about writing than the student goes over the student’s work line-by-line, and demonstrates how to correct specific problems. A grad student in my survey, an excellent writer, attributed her ability to her mother working with her that way on her writing every night during her K-12 years.

Many other students who could write well had attended private colleges and had instructors who line-edited their work. Unfortunately, many graduates of public universities, even the “Public Ivies,” have never had anyone line-edit their work. As a result, they have serious writing problems, despite the fact that they’ve written a huge number of pages.

How to institutionalize my recommendations? First, make basic English Composition a much more intensive writing course for undergraduate students than at present and hire trained instructors for this labor-intensive work. Some private universities do that, paying their comp teachers well and giving them five-year renewable contracts. Almost no public universities do anything remotely like that, except in some honors divisions.

Too many universities, even those making a serious attempt to include a quality Freshmen Comp course, do not follow up the basic course with subsequent intensive writing classes. Many students improve their writing during their freshman year and then either hit a plateau in their writing or, more often, forget what they learned and lapse into sloppy writing. Educators know that learned skills must be reinforced but many schools fail to do so.

Ideally, colleges would require sophomore and junior intensive writing courses with the subject matter meshing with the student’s major field of study, still with the instructor or an adjunct line-editing the work. Supplementing these courses, or even as a substitute, schools should require students to take the Collegiate Learning Assessment test a number of times. If students took this exam at the end of each college year, they’d have to prove that their writing meets a minimum standard.

At a deeper level, however, intensive English Composition only works if students know how to think logically. Many years ago as a freshman at Purdue University, I had to take a course in Basic Logic. Initially, I was skeptical about the subject, but it turned out to be one of the best courses that I ever took. Every day I use something that I learned in that class. When I read a strained analogy, I often hear Virgil Lokke, the instructor, proclaiming, “Argument by analogy is inherently false. No two things are the same.” I cannot imagine how I could have had a life as a writer without that course.

These days, whenever I suggest requiring a logic course for freshmen, faculty are usually incredulous. How could an old-fashioned subject descended from Greek philosophy possibly have a place in the Digital Age? In fact, the Digital Age has made logic more necessary than ever.

When assigned a paper, most students go to Google. They immediately hit a major roadblock: they cannot logically figure out what keywords, prompted by the assignment, will locate useful information. When they type something in the Google box and their search turns up a list, they confront another problem: they do not know how to distinguish between articles potentially useful for their paper and articles that aren’t worth looking at.

College students studying Shakespeare don’t need to memorize the Plantagenet kings, as they did when books were expensive and information hard to acquire. Today, typing “Plantagenet kings” into Google retrieves that list instantly. But students need to know how to figure out which Plantagenet kings were important to Shakespeare and whether a reference to a specific monarch is useful. Those higher order critical skills must underlie college writing.

Solving the keyword and article evaluation problem is easy for someone with logic skills, but it’s often a mystery to today’s students.

In an ideal world, undergraduates would learn to think and write well; their degrees would indicate specific academic achievements. My plan requires a strong university commitment and enough money to hire and pay writing instructors to teach language fundamentals and line-edit all those student papers.

It is certainly worth the effort.

Source:

Sperber, Murray. "We Must Overhaul College Writing." (2011): n. pag. The John William Pope Center. The John William Pope Center For Higher Education Policy, 21 June 2011. Web. 6 Nov. 2012. <http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=2539>.

The Future of Self-Improvement, Part I: Grit Is More Important Than Talent

by Jocelyn K. Glei

Illustration: Oscar Ramos Orozco

In the late '60s, Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel performed a now-iconic experiment called the  Marshmallow Test , which analyzed the ability of four year olds to exhibit "delayed gratification." Here's what happened: Each child was brought into the room and sat down at a table with a delicious treat on it (maybe a marshmallow, maybe a donut). The scientists told the children that they could have a treat now, or, if they waited 15 minutes, they could have two treats.All of the children wanted to wait. (Who doesn't want more treats?) But many couldn't. After just a few minutes or less, their resolve would break down and they would eat the marshmallow. But some kids were better at delaying gratification: They were able to hold out for the full 15 minutes.   When the researchers subsequently checked in on these same children in high school, it turned out that those with more self-control -- that is, those who held out for 15 minutes -- were better behaved, less prone to addiction, and scored higher on the SAT. Recounting Mischel's research in an excellent  New Yorker article (that this piece could not exist without), Jonah Lehrer writes that, after observing hundreds of hours of videotape of the children, Mischel concluded that the kids who resisted temptation used "strategic allocation of attention": Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow -- the "hot stimulus" -- the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from "Sesame Street." Their desire wasn't defeated -- it was merely forgotten. "If you're thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you're going to eat it," Mischel says. "The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place."

 

It's not difficult to see how self-control would be predictive of success in certain spheres. It means trading short-term gratification for long-term goals, skipping the temptation to go to the movies and working on your novel instead. But that's a relatively simple example -- one that makes the decision to exercise self-control, or not, easy to see. In reality, we are faced with hundreds of these "tradeoff decisions" within the span of a single day. As the thoughtful blogger James Shelley has written, very often when we talk about the skill of "productivity" what we are really talking about is "self-control" -- the disciplined ability to choose to do one thing at the cost of not doing another (perhaps more tempting thing).

 

Very often when we talk about the skill of ‘productivity’ what we are really talking about is ‘self-control.’

 

 

As the hierarchy of the traditional workplace breaks down, we are all gaining more freedom and flexibility. More and more, we can set our own long-term goals, we can determine our own work schedules, we can work at an office or at a coffee shop, we can make our own decisions about what we focus on today, and what we focus on tomorrow. But this "freedom" also brings responsibility -- a responsibility that, I would argue, demands a vastly increased capacity for self-control. In essence, Twitter is the new marshmallow. (Or Facebook, or Foursquare. Pick your poison.) At any given moment, a host of such "treats" await us. Emails, social media messages, text messages -- discrete little bits of unexpected and novel information that activate our brain's seeking circuitry, titillating it and inciting the desire to search for more. Our ability to resist such temptations, and focus on the hard work of creative labor, is part and parcel of pushing great ideas forward. And yet: Self-control isn't the whole story. Intrigued by what qualities would most accurately predict outstanding achievement, Harvard researcher Angela Duckworth picked up where Walter Mischel left off. As she outlines in this TEDx talk, Duckworth found that self-control is an excellent predictor of your ability to follow through on certain types of difficult tasks -- staying on your diet, studying for a test, not checking your email -- but it's not the most important factor when it comes to predicting success at "extremely high-challenge achievement." Duckworth was also suspicious of qualities like talent and intelligence as reliable predictors for remarkable achievement. And with good reason: Way back in 1926, a psychologist named Catherine Morris Cox published a study of 300 recognized geniuses, from Leonardo Da Vinci to Gottfried Leibniz to Mozart to Charles Darwin to Albert Einstein. Cox, who had worked with Lewis M. Terman to develop the Stanford-Binet IQ test, was curious what factors lead to "realized genius," those people who would really make their mark on the world. After reading about the lives of hundreds historic geniuses, Cox identified a host of qualities, beyond raw intelligence, that predicted "greatness." Studying Cox's findings, Duckworth isolated two qualities that she thought might be a better predictor of outstanding achievement:

 

1. The tendency not to abandon tasks from mere changeability.  Not seeking something because of novelty. Not "looking for a change."  2. The tendency not to abandon tasks in the face of obstacles. Perseverance, tenacity, doggedness. Duckworth boiled these two characteristics down to a quality she called "grit," defined as "the perseverance and passion for a long-term goal," and set about testing it as a predictor for outstanding achievement. Here's a recent  New York Times articlesummarizing Duckworth's research:   People who accomplished great things, [Duckworth] noticed, often combined a passion for a single mission with an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission, whatever the obstacles and however long it might take. ... She developed a test to measure grit, which she called the Grit Scale. It is a deceptively simple test, in that it requires you to rate yourself on just 12 questions, from "I finish whatever I begin" to "I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one." It takes about three minutes to complete, and it relies entirely on self-report -- and yet when Duckworth took it out into the field, she found it was remarkably predictive of success. At Penn, high grit ratings allowed students with relatively low college-board scores to nonetheless achieve high G.P.A.'s. Duckworth and her collaborators gave their grit test to more than 1,200 freshman cadets as they entered West Point and embarked on the grueling summer training course known as Beast Barracks. The military has developed its own complex evaluation, called the Whole Candidate Score, to judge incoming cadets and predict which of them will survive the demands of West Point; it includes academic grades, a gauge of physical fitness and a Leadership Potential Score. But at the end of Beast Barracks, the more accurate predictor of which cadets persisted and which ones dropped out turned out to be Duckworth's 12-item grit questionnaire. Duckworth carried out a similar "success study" with kids who competed in spelling bees. Again, it turned out that grit -- in this case, the ability to persist and passionately pursue your goal of winning the spelling bee whatever it takes -- was the best predictor of success. Verbal IQ scores were a factor, but they were inversely related to the grit scores. In essence, the smarter kids just didn't try as hard, but still did pretty well sometimes. Self-control was also an influential factor, but not as reliable a predictor of success as grit, and not a completely necessary factor. That is, there was a subset of kids who had poor self-control but a lot of grit, who still performed very well. If it was ever in question, we can now rest assured that dogged hard work is the cornerstone of remarkable achievement. That said, Duckworth's findings still raise some nagging questions: Is grit an inborn ability, just like intelligence or talent? Or, can grit be cultivated? We'll continue to examine the innerworkings of remarkable achievement in Part II of this article series. In the meantime, you can take Duckworth's Grit Scale Test here. What Do You Think? Can we develop our capacity for grit? How have you done it?

Source:

Glei, Jocelyn K. "The Future of Self-Improvement, Part I: Grit Is More Important Than Talent." (n.d.): n. pag. 99U. 99U. Web. 6 Nov. 2012. <http://99u.com/articles/7094/The-Future-of-Self-Improvement-Part-I- Grit-Is-More-Important-Than-Talent>.