Final Thesis Statement:
Although I agree with Chen up to a point, I cannot accept his overriding assumption that social media creates lasting and meaningful interpersonal connections. Using the concrete psychological and physiological research of Robin Dunbar, Maria Konnikova convinces me that social media and virtual interactions cannot replicate the importance of physical ones.
I think the strengths to this thesis statement is my stating of the opposing piece, and the position that I have on it. I believe I introduce the ‘they say’, and in doing so I introduce and outline the argument that I will be discussing in this paper. I think the thesis is somewhat long, but I do believe it is concise and specific to my topic. So I do like the length, I believe it to be a strength as it clearly outlines the topic of my paper, and the argument I will be making. I think one of the weaknesses of my thesis statement is that although it is specific to my topic, perhaps it is not all too specific to my arguments. By adding “using the concrete psychological and physiological research of Robin Dunbar”, I think I added a bit of a lense to what my arguments will be about, however I’m not sure if it is specific enough.
What I was reminded of about my writing process was how I have an instinct to write a lot. I think I form a lot of really interesting ideas and feel the need to explain them in depth. The issue here, is that some of those interesting ideas about the topic are not really supportive of my thesis. In other words, those arguments may be interesting arguments about social media, but not really about how social media and virtual interactions cannot replicate the importance of physical ones. I was also reminded of my ability to get stuck on ideas and get jammed into a paragraph, or even a sentence. I’m not going to call it writer’s block, but I think in an academic paper, the writing flow doesn’t come as easy, and I have to be more methodical in forming ideas.
The aspect of global revision that I focused on most during my revision was eliminating arguments that we not directly supportive of my thesis. When I went back and tried to tie everything in to my thesis statement, I found that some the arguments didn’t really fit all that well into what I was trying to argue. In doing so, I eliminated all of the ideas that could be considered confusing to the reader, and shortened my essay. This allowed me to expand on the other ideas that were much stronger and helped support my thesis. Specifically, I eliminated a paragraph that argued that social media can be used as a tool to spread hate. Although I thought parts of this argument helped explain why social media and virtual interactions cannot replicate the importance of physical ones, it certainly didn’t directly connect to that argument. So instead I took the parts that I thought were most strong and added them to another paragraph where I thought they could better support my argument.
I think I will approach Paper #2 differently by looking over the essay prompt before I start reading the pieces. I want to have an idea of what I need to take out of the readings before I begin so I can analyze and annotate with a purpose. Secondly, when forming my arguments, I will make sure they all support my thesis before I begin writing them. As mentioned before, I ended up deleting two full paragraphs because I realized they didn’t really fit into my essay. Writing out these arguments and my thesis beforehand will allow me to make sure everything I’m saying ties back nicely into the thesis statement. Lastly, I’ll be sure to interrogate my sentences and confirm they aren’t wordy. Not only was my rough draft really long, but there were also sentences that almost danced around a subject and were not very direct, and some sentences were useless altogether. Eliminating this ‘fluff’ will allow my writing to be more clear and concise.
