Visual Journal: Entry 10

 Since I began writing this journal, I’ve noticed a gradual improvement in the quality of both my writing style and research methods. My first posts were simple and short essays, which contained few quotes and citations. After a while, I tried to improve my writing style by including a greater variety of specific art terms and quoting more sources in the text. As I started to improve my research by finding different sources to back up my arguments, I noticed that my reference lists looked highly unprofessional. Until then, I had only posted simple website links as a reference to the sources I had read. To improve my formatting, I spent lots of time researching the Harvard style of referencing, and then started to include more detailed information about the origins of my sources. After discovering how to include ‘Long Quotations’ in my work, I finally perfected my reference lists, and also learned how to include in-text citations when directly quoting a source. Although it took a while to achieve, I’m unexpectedly proud at how much it improved the overall appearance of my journal entries.
 Aside from good academic practice, and presentation, the main benefits of writing this journal were the skills it gave me, for tracking down relevant ideas from reputable sources, and then using them to contextualise my arguments. By using citations to support my analyses, I was better able to convey my own ideas, and provide evidence for how a certain point relates to the topic being discussed.
 Although I feel that most of my entries achieved their goals, I can still identify room for improvement in some areas of my literary process. The most important aspect that I would like to focus on developing, is the structure of paragraphs within my entries. Whilst writing, I tried to sustain a vague composition of introduction, main body, and conclusion. However, I predict that my entries would benefit greatly from an increased focus on building a coherent narrative that carries the reader’s attention by clarifying and emphasising my points.
 The main lesson I learned from writing these entries, is how much time it takes to find good quotes. I found that the best method which worked for me, was to skim through the source material and accumulate as many relevant passages as possible. Then I could review these excerpts and highlight whichever ones were the most succinct and held the greatest impact. From there, it was much easier to provide citations whenever necessary, without breaking the flow of writing. I also noticed that this gave me a greater understanding and insight, into the author’s own perspective and critical analysis, of whatever subject they were discussing.