Over the past few weeks of listening to both positive and negative comments about the class's first five part paragraphs, there are a few qualities I noticed about virtually all of them. Almost everyone had at least one problem with their quotes; they weren't embedded correctly (using the word "pg" or just having incorrect lead in), they were too long, or they weren't in chronological order. After awhile, it became almost inevitable while listening to critiques that someone would bring embedding up eventually. Another popular mistake was not having all the needed transitions. I slipped up in that area, along with quite a few other people. The quality of the papers diction seemed to decrease as the paragraph went on. In the beginning, most people had strong, unique word choice that slowly faded to 5th grade vocabulary during the end, or just having words repeated quite a bit, which gave off the impression of running out of things to say. Even most concluding sentences were considerably weaker than most topic sentences.
Considering this was my, along with everyone else, first five part paragraph, I wouldn't say I did too badly. It might take a little bit of time to perfect this kind of structure because it's pretty different than anything I wrote in middle and elementary school. Transitions will definitely be the hardest thing for me to get comfortable doing. Even in less structured paragraph formats, I've struggled with using transitions. I also need to work on embedding. For my lead in, I need less plot summary and more in-depth analysis about the quote and why I chose it. Hopefully, after seeing so many great examples of paragraphs and hearing where we all need to improve on not only from the teacher, but from our peers, that all of us will be writing almost flawless paragraphs.
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