The Cause and Effect of Today’s Unemployment, Essay Example

Writing Processes

The pre-writing strategy I used was with an outline.  This has always been an effective writing strategy for me, as it helps guide my thoughts and ideas for topics.  Once I had my major topic headings for the subjects and flow of the paper, it enabled me to segregate and map my paper.  Next time I will use a different type of pre-writing strategy, as I believe brainstorming would be effective in allowing myself to jot down ideas and thoughts.  Ideally both of these could work well together, as I look forward to another essay.

The topic of my essay was in analyzing the causes and effects of today’s unemployment situation.  It was written for a general audience.  To make it accessible to any type of audience, I sought to include basic information, such as outlining the recession in the United States, which is of course an integral piece of the paper.  The main point of the essay was to depict the recession and to outline the cyclical effects on the economy, as it balances itself out with help from the government.  I wanted the audience to understand that in a recession, the normal dynamics still occur, such as in spending and in unemployment numbers.

Reviewing and Revising Processes

In my peer’s essay, I looked primarily for coherency and the development of ideas.  I wanted to be able to understand how the individual presented the argument, and be able to assess how the audience would be able to understand the analysis.  My peer made a number of interesting insights that I did not consider that were outside the scope of my paper.  As I analyzed the paper, I learned a lot about how to develop coherency in my writings; as it is easier to critique someone else’s writing as opposed to your own, as of course I knew what I meant even though I could have improved the paper.  The process reinforced my aim for the paper, which was to give a concise overview of the causes and effects for a general audience to understand.

In revising my paper, I added a number of specifics.  As I began to realize, my paper was quite conceptual in nature.  Thus I added specifics, such as in the timeline of the recession to give some facts in the paper.  I believe this helped it with a more factual basis, rather than just my synopsis of the events in these dynamics in the causes and effects.  I think the outcome was much better than my initial draft, in terms of clarity and in adding more facts.  Revising is not a strong point in my writing; this process certainly reinforced how necessary it is for me to take the time to review and revise my work.  This is something that I need to improve upon, as I realized in this process.

Assessing

The strongest aspect of my essay is the manner in which I give the overview.  I believe I did a good job of characterizing the essential dynamics of the paper in the relatively short space for such a topic.  The weakest part of the paper was likely the limited facts and examples I gave.  However, it may have been necessary to achieve the former consideration.  Next time I will do a better job in the pre-writing stages, as I believe that would help me gather my thoughts and facts to improve the conceptual and factual nature of the paper.  The experience altered my understanding of writing in many of the aforementioned ways, in what I need to improve upon and in establishing my strengths.  From the perspective of my audience and peers, the process enabled me to have another perspective in reading and writing, as I was forced to look at someone else’s paper and realize how difficult it may be to understanding what is being said, which is something I take for granted in my own writing, in terms of coherency.