Jared+S.+Memoir+Reflection

As soon as we began to discuss that our first paper was going to be a memoir, I knew what my topic or memory was going to be. Baseball has always played a very large role in my life. So, what could be better than to write about catching my first foul ball at a Major League Baseball game? Before this assignment, I had never heard of the term “zero draft”. The zero draft was easy in the fact that it was just me throwing thoughts on to a piece of paper. The zero draft was by far the fastest step to this paper. My first draft took forever to write due to the fact that my zero draft was so skimpy. I thought of the title while I was writing about the player that hit the ball that I caught, Sean Casey. I linked my story to the famous poem, “Casey at the bat”. In the poem, Casey is up to bat with a full count and ultimately strikes out to lose the game for his team. But, luckily for me, Sean Casey had a completely different outcome that day in Cincinnati. After receiving my first draft back from Professor Hartman and getting the peer reviews from the members of my group, I saw that there were not all that many changes that needed to be made. At some points, I threw in information that was irrelevant to the point of the memoir, and at some points, I could have added a lot more detail than I decided to in my first draft. So, after a little work, my final draft was done and ready to hand in.

In retrospect, it would have been a lot easier process if I had spent more time adding details to my zero draft. I think that the zero draft could have easily been the most helpful part of the process if I would have taken the time to fully think out the ideas that I knew I would be writing about.