Punctuation around quote integration is one area where I did struggle at the beginning of this semester. Olivia, our writing fellow, is the one who helped me correct this during the second writing project. Instead of “quote.” (author) I now know that the correct way to cite an author is “quote” (author). I feel as if I am good at using the correct grammar and punctuation. I do not find myself writing many run-on sentences and if I do, I generally know how to split them up. I also find it somewhat easy to create complex sentences with coordination and subordination. In middle school and high school, and even in some of elementary school, my teachers were strict with this. Whenever proofreading someone’s paper, those are the first things I generally look for to fix or bring to the writer’s attention. Small mistakes like this can make or break a really good sentence. Having poor punctuation is the majority of mistakes I find while proofreading peers’ papers. My skills of proofreading and being able to take other people’s suggestions has also improved this semester. Receiving ideas from other peers and a professor was a new experience for me. In the past, peer editing for me was just correcting grammar and punctuation, which I think is why that is where I start.
