Lauren Broshious

There are several things that are considered to be academically dishonest from Bowling Green State University. If you are caught in one of these acts, severe punishments could result. Academic dishonesty comes in multiple forms. Some of them are: turning in work from a previous class (unless you check with the instructor and they say it’s okay), paying someone to do the work for you, using someone’s old work and turning it in, not doing work yourself, using spark notes, and plagiarizing.

The prompt that I am choosing to write about is parents having access to their teens’ online accounts. Respectable parents give life, food, and shelter to their children. Parents do a lot for their kids, they want to see them succeed and grow to be well developed adults. With all of the things that parents do for their kids, I believe that they should have access to their kids’ facebook accounts, myspace accounts, etc. Most parents have their child’s best interest at heart. They want to know what is going on in their kids’ lives, and some kids aren’t very open or truthful with their parents. Through social networking sites parents can get somewhat of a good feel of what is going on with their kids. If their child is being picked on or has inappropriate pictures up, they could never know. By parents knowing what is on their kids’ websites, they could be preventing damage to their kid’s reputation. To some people this might not seem like a big deal, but the audience viewing these websites could be fellow classmates, principals, future employers, religious leaders, and family members. Teenagers might not think about it at the time, but to the people that I just listed, posted photos or things written publicly could be highly offensive or inappropriate. Some things that happen in peoples’ lives should be kept private, and with social networking sites more and more things are made public. Sure there are positives from being social with friends online, but do those positives outweigh the negatives? If parents have passwords to their kids websites, it could keep them in the know, therefore keeping their kids safe.

The first rough draft of essay number two is supposed to be started on Monday September 21. I  like getting somewhat ahead of things so I’d like to start working on that by starting the essay this weekend. This has to be completed by Wednesday, and that will be done. I think for my topic, I will be writing about number 2, or parents having access to their teen’s websites. I could begin my work by researching negative things that some teenagers post online and things following that lead. I will write down what I find to be interesting, catchy, or just some good facts. From there I can take what I have written down and plan out the draft. By this I mean putting certain facts together to make good paragraphs or coming up with things that the opposing side will have to say about my topic. I believe that thinking in advance as to what the opposing side has to say and blocking their arguments might come as a struggle to me, so I will have to work on that. After creating the first rough draft I will check over and revise it many times to make sure it fits the qualifications that it should. I will have some peers review it and work on it dilligently until it is due.

One of the revision strategies that I am going to use before I am going to use before our next class is reading the essay aloud to myself. I chose it because it seems as though it would be the  best way to catch awkward sentences or phrases and pick out things that don’t flow correctly and change them for the better.

My plan for revising is to do a lot of editing. I plan on looking at my paper atleast two times a day until the final draft is due. This will hopefully get more ideas in my head and make my paper better. I also plan on spell checking it a lot to make sure everything is spelled correctly and that there are no evident errors. In class on last Friday, we had a fellow classmate peer review our paper. We also sent our papers to our teacher. Through reading both  of their comments, I discovered that my paper needed a lot of work. So, I changed my paper around for about the seventh time, but this time a lot was changed to further myself to the goal of completeing my This I Believe essay. I am planning on making an outline which hopefully will bring out my strong points or let me know if I need to do more work to make the essay stronger. I don’t have any quotes in my paper, but I have to be sure to constantly check the mechanics, grammar, and punctuation. There may often be things that one skips over, so it is best to proof read a lot and have others look at the paper too. I have changed my paper quite a bit since we started writing it, and I am hoping that it will be a good example of an essay that goes with the series This I Believe.