Nancy Somers And Laura Saltz's Novice As Expert: Writing The Freshman Year

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I was born with asthma and I still have asthma related problems to this day. I have learned skills to deal with having asthma attacks like: carry your inhaler with you at all times, tell someone as soon as you feel your breathing is labored and slow your breathing if your chest feels tight. Just like these tips have helped me with my asthma through the years, so too have my writing classes helped me develop and fine tune my writing skills. In Nancy Somers and Laura Saltz’s piece “Novice as Expert: Writing the Freshman Year”, they explore the struggles and patterns that freshmen in college face when writing in their new environment. They claim that “being a novice allows students to be changed by what they learn, to have new ideas, and to understand …show more content…

I would then go into more depth about the differences and similarities in the essay. Although I could identify the concepts from the articles I wanted to talk about, I had trouble developing a thesis that would ask the next question.
In high school, I struggled to make a developed thesis. I am argumentative by nature and that helped me when coming up with research questions and the foundation for a thesis. However, I had trouble asking the next set of questions to really show the depth in my arguments, which is necessary in college. While at Mason I have progressed with my thesis’, which can be seen when I wrote:
“Although both articles are exploring writing and the change that needs to or that does happen, Peter Elbow’s idea of growth in writing is a more naïve and simplistic approach to writing, where as Somers and Saltz’s article, while still very general, takes a more realistic point of view at the writing experience for students and new writers”.
This was also an in-class essay, but here I see that I not only mention what the authors are talking about but also what that means. By learning to ask that next question I have more places to go in my paper. I still need to master this skill but for an in-class essay written in December, I think I have improved significantly since

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