PB3A

The scholarly publication “Self-Efficacy Beliefs and Motivation in Writing Development” by Frank Pajares and Gio Valiante explores the relationship between a writer’s self-confidence, or rather “self-efficacy” and his or her motivation and performance in school. The authors covered an extensive amount of information, but focused on the major ways that self-efficacy is gained (and broken), the dominate ways of measuring self-efficacy, the various ways in which self-efficacy positively and negatively affects motivation and performance, and the different ways that gender impacts self-efficacy. One of the most striking parts of the paper, to me, was where self-efficacy stems from. The most influential source is previous performance, but “social persuasions” also play a major role. An individual’s self-efficacy is said to be directly linked to his academic performance (Pajares and Valiante 160). In transforming this paper I think it is appropriate to incorporate enhancing self-efficacy in each of the two genres.

For the transformation to an older audience, I am going to prepare a magazine article entitled “6 Ways to Improve Your Self-Confidence” that would perhaps belong in the magazine “Health.” However, the article focused on the impact that self-confidence can have on one’s performance, such as how one’s level of self-efficacy is related to the duration of efforts that individual will put into a project, more so than how to improve one’s self confidence. For this reason, I think a somewhat along the lines of “6 Ways that Improving Your Self-Confidence Will Improve Your Life” may be more fitting—though I am not entirely sure. While I recognize that the latter title is a bit wordy, I’m more concerned with which will work better with the paper that I am transforming. I plan on using one tip from a few of the major topics the paper discusses such as “how is self-efficacy formed,” “how do you assess self-efficacy,” “how are self-efficacy and achievement goal orientations related,” and so on. To add to the “magazine” style format, I may try to tie in my first potential article title (if I do decide to go with the second) as an add-on to my article, perhaps titles “Plus 3 Ways to Improve Your Self-Confidence.”

To transform this to a younger audience, I initially considered the idea of composing some sort of inspiring “self-help” book that was appropriate for a younger audience. And then I remembered, no book. Well, maybe not no book, but it’s probably better as a back up option. While I was home for the weekend, I took some time to look around and see if I could get inspired by anything. I found some old mad-libs books, and decided that was a pretty cool genre to try to manipulate. Part of the article I read mentioned that self-efficacy can arise from a number of sources: primarily from prior experiences, but also from “social persuasions.” Thus, I thought it was only appropriate to transform this into a genre where social persuasions can occur. The activity book consists of a series of pages, each with its own story, with blank lines to fill in words to personalize the activity—underneath each blank the book specifies the type of word needed (i.e. adjective, verb, etc.). I would tailor the pages to promote self-confidence amongst friends, so perhaps instead of a blank needing an adjective to complete the sentence, I would specify that it needed to be a positive adjective. I also think it could be beneficial to include some pages that are intended for an individual to complete on his own, and others that are meant for friends to complete about other.

Thlog #8

This has, without a doubt, not been the easiest week of this quarter or school year. Going into the week, I knew it was going to be a long one. Monday held two midterms and a paper due, and following the completion of my second midterm I was feeling rather overwhelmed. Despite the syllabus for the class saying something along the lines of “I would rather you come to class then not, regardless of not being prepared,” I felt like the level of contribution I would be able to add to class would be very minimal, and thus it was perhaps better to miss that day. Because of that situation, this was another short week in writing 2 for me.

I’m not sure if it was because I was not in class on Monday, but I felt generally confused during the “preview,” per say, of WP3. I know I have the prompt perfectly accessible to me, and that we looked at several examples in class, but I still don’t feel like I’m 100% clear on the assignment. I’m hoping that it’s the type of assignment where clarity arises once you really get into it, which I’m confident that it will be. The thing that threw me off the most, as I believe was true with the rest of the class, was the transition from being able to pick any sort of scholarly article or literature to only those available to pick from (all about writing). I guess I understand that writing, and the aspects of writing that are discussed within each of these scholarly articles, is present all around us, I’m just having a bit of trouble seeing it. Then again, the tools that we have focused on in class (such as framing, as we learned about this week) are probably the tools that I need to use in order to find instances of these applications.

Thlog #7

I’m almost positive that last week when I was writing my thlog I was discussing how we had just finished up writing project one, yet that isn’t exactly possible considering now we’ve finished up writing project two. This week I felt like we had a much more successful peer-editing “session” than that for the writing project before, largely due to allotting a greater amount of time. I found the exercise of peer-editing to be a bit more challenging than I had initially anticipated, despite leading to what I believed to be more beneficial results. Instead of one of my peers telling me “Hey, this sentence doesn’t really seem to fit here, nor does it seem to have a purpose” I instead got “Hey, what is the purpose of this sentence? What does it contribute to your paper?” This follows along with a statement that was made in class about the purpose of peer editing, and more specifically what it ought not to be. Peer editing is not revising someone’s paper—that is what a first, second, third, and so on draft are for (all written by the writer). Rather, peer-editing should be a source of getting writers to think about why they did what they did, and if the way they did it is the best possible way. One thing that I think may be helpful for future edits is to come to class with your draft highlighted according to the “highlighting” assignment that we have previously done, or for whoever is editing your paper to highlight it accordingly. Sometimes I think it can be nice to have a “fresh eye” look at your paper in this way as while to you it may seem that you have enough direct evidence, to your reader you may not.