For the following Voyant visualization, I used student essays from one of my Composition I course. For this assignment, the students had to write a proposal argument offering a solution to an environmental problem. This visualization offered some intriguing information. One of which was that the word “plastic” was the most used word at 169 times. My hunch for this is that marine plastic pollution was the sample topic that I offered to the class, so I’m attributing this one, and the fact that “ocean” was used 74 times, to mimicking. When I look at the students who chose marine plastic pollution as their final topic, it It makes me realize that I need to remove my sample topic as an option for them to use because they’re not doing the critical work of topic proposal discovery and research that is necessary for them to meet the outcomes of this assignment. On reviewing the grades of those students who coat-tailed on my sample topic, it was evident that their essays did not investigate the topic deeply enough because they started off at a shallow point. Another important thing that I noticed was that the word “problem” showed up much more than the word “solution” in these essays. To me that indicates that they focused more on problem aspect of their essays vs. the solution. I’m not sure if that is a negative observation or not. On one hand, I would like to see it to be more even. On the other hand, this is a first year composition course, and I wonder if that sense of balance is more an aspect of the second level of composition. Perhaps, I should be happy that they worked so hard in describing, researching and explaining this portion is enough to show that they have met their academic goals of the course.

With further reflection, I think this tool would be very useful in the classroom at the rough draft level to show the students the results of their collective writing. I think this will create an unique visual of their collective body of writing. I think viewing this group visualization earlier in the drafting process will allow for observations that are more useful in their individual writing processes. I can use our teaching management system through our bulk downloading and uploading option to facilitate the use of this tool in the classroom.