Rough:
The value of recognizing and discussing joy is to be able to realize when you are in these moments, and being able to differentiate between joy and pleasure. If someone strives to feel joy all the time, they will always come up short and feel as though they are missing something in their life. If someone strives to find the pleasures in everyday life, they will find success more often than not. Without knowing the differences between joy and pleasure, how will people know what they really enjoy, is it clubbing every night or is it the pleasure you feel from that first sip of coffee every morning. Smith highlights her ability to find pleasure in the little things, and for her it is any type of food and discussing people’s mannerisms in depth with her husband. In this ability she is able to find pockets of pleasure everyday, rather than chasing an irreplaceable feeling of joy.
Final (almost):
Joy is a misconceived feeling that is often confused with happiness and pleasure. It is an important topic to discuss especially during college where people glamorize “the grind”, which is essentially when people work all day long, day in and day out. They wake up, eat, go to school or work, go to the gym, come home, eat, watch tv, and go to bed. Not enough people seek out pleasure in their day to day activities, and subsequently they just believe that life is gray and soulless. By opening up the formerly-disregarded conversation about joy, more people can become aware of what it really is and how it helps enhance our lives. The value of understanding joy is to be able to recognize the difference between joy and pleasure, because either emotion brings up vastly different feelings. Before I really explain, I want to clarify that I’m not trying to say that pleasure is bad or unimportant, but that it is readily accessible, easily lost, and usually replaceable. Joy, on the other hand, is found through your connections with others or after a difficult situation, so joy tends to house more emotions than pleasure does and is subsequently harder to feel. If someone wishes to feel joy all the time, they will always come up short and feel as though they are missing something in their life. If someone strives to find the pleasures in everyday life, they will find success more often than not. Smith highlights her ability to find pleasure in the everyday-little things, and for her it is any type of food and discussing people’s mannerisms in depth with her husband (330). With this ability she is able to find pockets of pleasure everyday, rather than chasing an irreplaceable feeling of joy, but more about that later. Without knowing the differences between joy and pleasure, how will people know what really helps elevate the wellbeing of their lives? Ask yourself if you prefer the pleasure of clubbing every weekend or the connection you feel after getting lunch with a loved one.
How effective is what you say?
The first step in my revision process for this paragraph was to read it over a couple times, along with the rest of my essay to make sure that I stayed consistent with my argument. I knew I would need to go pretty in depth with this paragraph, as it was in its very rough-early stages which was based on my initial reactions to the reading and used simple sentence structures. The main idea was there, but I honestly confused myself a little bit with what I wrote. Granted, I do recognize the unanswered question in the final paragraph, but that is because I go further into that topic in the rest of my essay. I made sure to make my point more clear from the rough to the final by adding and clarifying my examples, expanding on ideas I didn’t touch on strongly, and bringing in ideas from my claims in other paragraphs of my essay for cohesiveness. I recognize that the final paragraph is quite long, so I anticipate having to go back and cut out some fluff before I submit the final essay, but I want to leave some time before I go back so that I can have a fresh mind. Overall, I am happy with what I wrote, but I know I will read it back and revise a little more later.
Have you used metacommentary?
In the final paragraph, I believe I used metacommentary twice, maybe three times. The first is explaining “the grind” instead of assuming that the reader understands what I’m talking about. I name what it is and give an example as to what it could look like. The second time is when I clarify that I’m not trying to paint pleasure in a bad light, because I realized that in my rough draft it sounded confusing, even to the writer. The third time (that I’m not sure counts) is when I say “but more on that later”. This is me saying to the reader that I recognize that what I’m saying may be confusing now, but I will explain more about it later in this essay.
