John Daniel Norombaba

Scott Streitfeld

Writing 39C

07 February 2022

Reflective Writing: Midpoint Self-Assessment

Research and Planning:

In the early phases, I responded to the expectations with a heavy amount of cursory research. Originally, I wanted to write about solitary confinement and mental health, but really wanted to find a bridge between my discipline of technology and the class’s theme of mass incarceration. Cursory research led me to electronic monitoring from the EFFLinks to an external site., a source I trusted because of their prior work and interests. So, I placed both topics next to each other to find articles, and eventually found a better groove within electronic monitoring (see photo 1).

My main issue was making sure my topic was viable, which is why I turned to academic journals. Finding academic journals to read originally seemed daunting, but the library module’s embedded videoLinks to an external site. allowed me to find more search terms to use with EBSCO and Google, and work at a faster pace reading. Moving into the Advocacy Project, I want to know more the problematic pieces within ankle monitors, rather than the people involved in the issue. Composition wise, I will try to document more, and hold more snapshots of information, rather than saving over a document. Now that I have an idea of the stakeholders in electronic monitoring (prisons, agencies, the incarcerated, along with groups advocating against/alternatives), I can better an argument around the topic’s prompt.

Development, Revision, and Collaborating:

Because week six for me looks less chaotic than previous weeks, I plan on working on the paper earlier. I also want to work on my conclusions and will possibly experiment with making connections outside of mass incarceration or ankle monitors. Now that I have worked with multimodal evidence, I want to engage more with that type of evidence, rather than presenting it as I did in the Context Project, as statistics (see photo 2). Compared to past writing, I responded more to the feedback given to me from other people and did not entirely rely on myself to make edits. Next to office hours, Canvas feedback helped me the most (See photo 3). I revised the last sentence and appended the following to the paragraph: “Especially with the existing stigma… Ankle monitors as an alternative means of incarceration is still incarceration. They only expand the issue as the structural and societal racism experienced by Black individuals in the criminal justice system remains mostly untouched.” As a reviser of my own work, I let myself slow down with the complex sentences with too many commas and clauses. And as a collaborator, I learned different ways to present information to others, not only through the prose of the scholars, but of my peers in WR39C. My writing process is a little more organized, as one of the new things I’ve done include the document from Figure 1 and keywords. The flexibility the class has given me, along with the working draft requirements (not needing an introduction or conclusion), allowed me to work more on strong bodies and a narrative style introduction.