Writing Center

           I made an appointment for 9:30 this morning at the writing lab. I was, honestly, not too excited about this, but now I am so glad I went. It turned out to be a great experience, and I would not even mind going back again before the final draft is due. Thirty minutes was a short time to go through my whole paper, but we spent the time well. First we decided on what we would work on because of our time frame.  I did not bring and introduction or conclusion, but we did work on those. She gave me some great ideas for both of them. She told me to go through my paper and underline the most important sentence in each paragraph. We started by reading through the paper and fixing errors that stuck out. She did some reconstructing and reorganizing which will definitely help my paper be clearer. I told her I was struggling with the counter-argument of the paper so she helped me with that as well. We came up with a clear argument that I am confident about. My topic was somewhat unclear, but now I know exactly what direction my paper will be going. Now I will go back and correct all of the obvious mistakes. I will then reorganize my paragraphs and do a little bit more research on my counter-argument. I also struggled with the tense that I would use because I was switching off very often. She explained how to fix that and what would sound best where. We added a few paragraphs so the word count should not be a problem. My paper went from around seven paragraphs to about twelve paragraphs. This is a huge improvement already. The only thing I am concerned with now is citation issues. She helped me get the right idea about that as well because my in-text citations were not looking so good. I definitely realized I needed to look up in-text citations on Perdue Owl. The writing center is most definitely something I will use now throughout my college career. It has improved my paper drastically. This experience has made me think about things I would have never thought about before. My writing is improving every day and the writing center is another great step in helping this process. I am excited about getting this paper written and seeing the improvement reflect on my grade.