Who knew highlighting could be so useful? No, I'm not talking about those bulky pens that end up at the bottom of your backpack after the teacher told you you'll need 4 different colors for the school year. I'm talking about highlighting within a Word Document, or Google Doc in this case. During class on Monday, we were asked to highlight sentences within our WP1 drafts in different colors. We differentiated the highlights by main topics of each paragraph, quotes used from sources, citations from the required readings, and our own analysis.
Seeing my once dull, white and black paper light up with all these different colors on my screen in front of me truly inspired me to go above and beyond for this paper. I got so obsessed with the highlights that I found myself straying away from the lesson plan and adding comments within my Google Doc to help enhance my paper later that night when I would revise it. I asked myself questions like "Does this relate to your thesis?" and "How does this connect to the rest of the paper?". When I found myself answering these questions and saying "No, this makes no sense" I would write a new sentence to tie everything together or just scrap the sentence and delete it.
This writing activity was extremely helpful and illustrated in my mind how the writing process can come along and how some aspects of writing can be just glossed over, which is ultimately detrimental to the final product. I am ever thankful of Zack for making us do this activity, which at first was obscure, but I think truly made me become a better writer.
Obviously doing this one highlighting activity is not going to win me a writing award or make me the next famous author. I can say that I will keep the activity in the back of my mind as I write my PB2A and WP2, and I'll sure as hell be highlighting the shit out of the rest of my papers to come.
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