Reflection on Project 2

My Project 2 paper came together at the last minute as I finally understood the meaning of the project and how to effectively explain to my readers how to analyze a piece of writing. Overall this paper was a success but I am still struggling to my best work on the paper because I don't feel like I fully understand what is expected as college writer.

Heidrich, Nadine, "Reflection - Day 96/365" 02/01/2014 via flickr.com Attribution 2.0 Generic 

1. My first draft really focused on the article and it was completely about the article's rhetorical situation. I didn't mention anything about my audience or write in a way that would accommodate my writing. I was unaware of my own rhetorical situation which is what significantly changed from draft one to the final draft. 
2. My thesis in the first draft was focused on what the article was talking. When I revamped my thesis I spoke about what rhetorical strategies the author used to get across what the article was talking about. This fundamental shift got me on track for what this paper was suppose to be about.
3. What led me to this shift in my thesis, is that I wasn't on track for what the paper needed to be about. Also, my audience was completely wrong. I was writing for a teacher who understood the material instead of a group of students who need to know how to rhetorically analyze piece of literature. 
4. This change, I don't think affected my credibility as an author. Instead it made me more credible because the paper was on topic and was better written because of that. Without an on topic paper my readers would have suffered from bad examples in regards to rhetorical strategies and a focus that dealt with only the text instead of the whole rhetorical situation the article was written in. 
5. The changes addressed the audience more directly and writing in the final draft more geared towards their level of understanding. In the end, the final draft addressed the audience with explicit implicit sentences that clearly analyze why rhetorical strategies of the article were effective or not effective and how that sway the audience one way or the other regarding the purpose of the article.
6. My first draft was very repetitive. I would analyze a piece a quote for example and then write a one sentence analysis. Then, I attempted to expand upon that first piece of analysis but that second sentence had the exact same meaning as the first bit. In the final draft, I decided to vary up my sentence structure. I analyzed the text with a simple sentence that had no conjunctions. Then I followed the simple sentence with an in depth analysis that was a complex and addressed many ideas.
7. This change in sentence structure and organization made it clear to the audience right away why they read a sample from the text because they knew what rhetorical strategy it exemplified and whether or not it was effective. Then I dropped that sample into the realm of the article's rhetorical situation to help my audience understand why the rhetorical strategy was effective with the author's targeted audience.
8. Since this paper was an analysis paper at its heart I really just focused on my paper conforming to the conventions of the essay by providing ample amounts of examples and analysis of these examples. I differentiated from past analysis papers that I have written by using a lot more paraphrasing when trying to grasp the entire paper's organization into a paragraph and still provide analysis. This was my major struggle when trying to conform to the conventions of an analysis paper. 
9. This process of reflections helps me to identify my identity as a writer because it lets my reflect on what I did in my paper that looking back on it might of been unclear. My identity as a writer I assume is one that needs to be extremely clear with his audience but in doing so is so overly clear that it gets repetitive and therefore confusing. I need to shape my writing in a different way so that I can eliminate my repetitiveness and stick to be super clear.