The last essay that I wrote for English 110 was extremely difficult for me in terms of finding the correct evidence to use in the paper. I struggled finding the correct source that would connect my story to the prompt that I was supposed to be writing about. The prompt that I selected had to do with an event or person that changed me. The event I chose was the service trip that I attended in Dallas, Texas back in 2017. After a lot of contemplating, I decided to revolve my essay around Yoshino’s idea of covering. I incorporated Yoshino’s text as evidence by using a couple of different tactics. The first tactic was to incorporate Yoshino’s idea of covering into my introduction paragraph; ” . In Kenji Yoshino’s essay “The New Civil Rights” he uses the word “covering” to describe the actions taken by a person in order to fit in instead of standing out.”. By doing this I showed the reader that my paper was going to build on evidence from Yoshino. The second tactic was to add a small example of covering except, this example was actually a time that someone did the opposite of covering. I did this to show how the people I met in Dallas changed me because they were able to resist covering. I also integrated the text by carrying the idea of covering throughout the paper.
The format of paragraphs were also very intentional. I used a format called “TRIAC” which included a topic sentence, restriction, illustration (quote), analyses and conclusion. I had previously done a TRIAC homework assignment on Yoshino’s text. I used that assignment to help guide me as I did my paragraphs for my final paper. I became more confident in my ability to use quotations after I got comfortable with the “TRIAC” format.
