Journal 35

My most recent blog post discussing Walt Whitman's search for self seems to have shown slight improvements from a post that I had written concerning the Declaration of Independence.  On my prior writing, I must not have proof-read very well because I found that in one of the sentences I wrote "they can also been" instead of "they could have also been" or "they can also be".  Sometimes grammatical errors such as this happen when I know what I am thinking for an essay, but my mind forgets the correct tense of the sentence as I am typing or my typing speed cannot keep up with what I am thinking.  Also in the discussion concerning the Declaration of Independence, I did not appear to leave a space in between the paragraphs.  I think that doing this appears neater and further emphasizes a change in topic from the paragraph above.  It is possible that I left a space when I typed the post in Microsoft Word, but sometimes after copying and pasting, any gaps between lines are taken out.  At least, that is what I have noticed previous times when I was about to publish a post.  Furthermore, I had mentioned an event that I remembered learning in my history class.  This is fine as long as it fits in with the theme of the blog discussion, however, I neglected to give a citation for the book from which I received that information.  It is important when writing to always give due credit to whatever is used and analyzed in a writing.  Several words, also, had been used as quotations from the Declaration of Independence itself.  It was useful to use these as a reference to help prove my point, yet they should have been placed inside quotation marks to set them apart from the rest of the sentence and to show that they had come from the document.  Finally, I did use a few examples in order to demonstrate my point of view, but looking back, if I would have used more quotes then my argument would have been even stronger.