Welcome everyone to TWIL number 3!! Now this week of reflecting on amazing, brilliant, inspiring in class learning we did, I’m instead going to focus on some one on one revisions I did with Ms Willemse. Now you might be thinking an entire blog post about one revision is a bit extra, however I believe it’s a key thing I learned this week so why not.
At the end of the previous week we had submitted our milestone 1, an academic response that answered the question “How can the suffragette movement demonstrate both how much and how little has changed for women?” We then had this entire week to keep revising it until it was good enough for a satisfactory grade. I started on my revisions right away and one of the big things I needed to fix was my works cited. I had included my sources that I used for research, when it turns out I only needed to include sources of what I actually quote. I made these changes as well as a few other parts of my texts and then handed in my second draft expecting everything to be good now.

A day later I get a notification from Showbie “Ms. Willemse made a change to…….” and I know I will need to revise once again. This draft’s feedback was a lot more based on my actual writing however my citations were still far from perfect. I learned that everything that is put in citations while needs to be mentioned in the text also has to be cited in the text too. Meaning if I put a quote or statistic in from one of these sources I have to put that source in the writing as well as the works cited. Looking back this seems obvious that I would need to do this but it just hadn’t crossed my mind. I also need to alphabetize my citations (and indent them correctly but she didn’t mention that here). So I made these changes and re handed it in hoping that this time I would’ve gotten a satisfactory.

Well guess what, it wasn’t satisfactory. I imagine by this point my teacher was fed up of trying to get ,e to understand how to do a proper works cited but I guess this is all a part of the joy of teaching/learning. By this draft I had increased the amount of writing which meant I had the end of my conclusion on the works cited page. This apparently turns out to be not ok for a works cited page and so it was changed. Willemse also explained that I had to indent the opposite lines from what I did originally. With this feedback I felt like I had finally conquered the art of making a works cited page.

Being able to write and understand MLA citations is a very important skill to know. It’s used in all sorts of professional documents and will be an essential in university work. I didn’t realize how untrained I was on using them and making a proper works cited page but after this milestone I feel ready. While some people might’ve been frustrated by this constant feedback and revising I really enjoyed seeing what I could do better at. I now feel way more confident in citing my sources. It’s much better to learn my lesson now then get into a professional setting and mess it up there. While I didn’t talk about taming if the shrew nor the five different essays we read this week in this post I think it was important to show this small growth I made. After all these posts are about something you learned and it’s clear to see that this week I learned how to make a perfect works cited page.