Project 2 Reflection: Organized Chaos

After the process of not knowing what in the world I should do for my project, and creating an incredibly disorganized rough draft, I do believe that my second project came out quite marvelously.  I had quite the bit of trouble of trying to organize my thoughts on not only how to write out about the dorms that underclassmen live in, but also about where I even wanted to begin!  That in itself, organization and brainstorming, were my main struggles with this project.  The way I solved that problem was with a little help from peer review, and sorting out my thoughts by talking to my friends and asking their opinions.  I even emailed Prof. L for some guidance as well.

I feel as though I did a really good job at relating each evaluation back to my thesis, even if I didn’t talk about each individual criteria applicable to the evaluation of the different dorms.  Not only do I feel confident in my evaluations, I also believe that I did a grand job at organizing my posts so that it goes from the introduction post with the map, to the evaluations of the dorms’, and finishing up with my works cited page.  However, the works cited page gave me problems when it came to formatting it, as in it would not allow me, for whatever reason, to invert the second line in any citations that were longer than one line.  Yet I just figure let it be bygones.  Regardless, my formatting is crisp and well organized, and it makes me squee in happiness.

I believe I crafted a fairly strong evaluation, and that I could possibly do a similar evaluation again in the future.  I could easily use this new experience to inspire me to become more thought provoking when it comes to evaluating movies, video games, as well as books and shows that I would like other people to check out.  Evaluations are already used everyday outside of the classroom, such as reviews for movies found on rotten tomatoes, or book reviews inside magazines.

If and when I use evaluative writing in the future, I am sure I will go about the same process.  However, I will think out what I will evaluate the topic or subject at hand, and what criteria it will be held up to.  I can see myself using this process, not only for the benefit of trying to sell a product to others, but also for the benefit of myself when it comes to determining if I want to buy something or not.  The process of evaluating helps lay out the pros and cons of situations, and helps to organize thoughts on what should be done in reaction to something.

Overall, this project started off as a pain in the arse, but in the end, I wound up really enjoying it.  I loved watching my project work its way together from chaos to beautiful organization.