Writing doesn’t come easily to me, which must make me a glutton for punishment. It has taken me years of training, learning to structure an essay and unlearning to begin again. Only since attending HSU am I realizing how exceptional my writing has become. Over the course of two semesters, I have seen my writing expand and grow. While I still adhere to the training I received in high school, I am excited to now take these tools and develop my own unique style in the years to come. From the beginning, I wanted to something with “An Editorial,” that I had never done before: include a conversation and speaking into an essay. In order to do this, I wrote the conversation I had with my teacher down first and built the paragraph around it. I elected …show more content…
While I understand that my diction in the piece may be simplistic, it is something I have striven to correct in later essays. “An Editorial” was the first time I wrote more than three drafts for an assignment. This experience has taught me that writing multiple drafts is not something to be ashamed of, and that writing does not have to be perfect the first or even the third time around. My high school writing habits have grown from a few drafts to over eight in various essays, adding and taking away sentences and even whole paragraphs each time. Thus, I learned not to be afraid to make big changes to an essay. In the first drafts, I included details about my location and class that were unnecessary, and sentences such as “We chose the theme, had potlucks, and stalked-I’m sorry, took photos of everyone,” were later removed (“An Editorial” Draft 1). While writing, I often went back to the second paragraph in order to elaborate on emotions and make it feel more relatable. This lead to the sentence “But I was too nervous; afraid that I wouldn’t make friends, or that my ideas would be ignored or outright rejected”(“An Editorial” Draft …show more content…
I selected the penny debate as it is a political topic, but not extremely polarizing or tense. I rejected my initial idea of incorporating a paragraph on the history of the penny, understanding that it is not necessary to know it in order to removing pennies. However, I was able to include a condensed history in my paragraph on Patriotism. Over the course of writing, I played with position of Rounding Tax, Convenience, and Charity paragraphs. I settled on the final configuration because I concluded that it was important to understand the political motivations before the practicality and use of pennies. For research, I looked to government websites and documents, like 2014 Biennial Report to Congress as required by The Coin Modernization, Oversight, and Continuity Act of 2010 (Public Law 111-302), for information on the cost of production and specifications on the content of pennies. For arguments, I looked to lobbyists for and against keeping the penny. I definitely succeeded in creating hook by invoking two penny related idioms, one which asks for an opinion and the other which gives it. Furthermore, I believe I did well in showing the money trail involved in the producing the penny. Throughout the year, and especially with “My Two Cents on the Penny,” I learned that I work best with a close deadline verses a distant one. I am a natural procrastinator and perfectionist,
Throughout the past decade, costs of everything have skyrocketed. According to Source C, America used to have “five and dime stores;” now its a dollar store. In addition, no one can buy anything with just a penny anymore. The source also made a fair observation that these worthless zinc disks are, “behind chair cushions or at the back of sock drawers next to your old tin-foil ball. Quarters and dimes circulated; pennies disappear because they are literally more trouble than they are worth.” According to a New York Times article, “it takes nearly a dime today to buy what a penny bought back in 1950.” The penny is still stuck in the 1950s while America just keeps moving on. As stated by Mark Lewis in his concept of establishing a bill, “the bill would not ban pennies, but merely discourage their use by establishing a system under which cash transactions would be rounded up or down.” (Source A) This motive will help keep the America exceed and
Writing an essay often seems to be an overwhelming task for many individuals. For students like myself, who came from another country, writing can be more difficult and challenging. It can be very frustrating to fully comprehend an idea, and being unable to express it proficiently in English can be excruciating. For these reasons, assistance is often needed to become an effective writer. The focus of this paper is to demonstrate the process on how I organized and accomplished my most recent essay, and to identify the struggles I encountered when writing the paper. In addition, plans on how to improve my next paper, based on the teacher’s feedback from my previous essay, and topics including methods on how instructors can help develop my essay
Writing a decent essay is as tedious, as nerve-racking, and as strenuous as constructing a layer cake from scratch. First you have to decide that you are going to tackle this feat, and that can be your biggest challenge, motivation. Then you must figure out what kind of cake batter you want to use. Collect all the ingredients to mesh together well, making one layer at a time. You throw all the layers together hoping that somehow they will come together to form a nifty design, but they don’t immediately. For now it is just a leaning tower of cake parts. So you start revising and modifying, adding toothpicks, trying to rectify the lean of the cake on one side. You coat the whole damn thing in icing, attempting to make it look better, but the first coat always turns out like a child’s Play-Doh experiment. Then you begin to refine the finite details and to make the stylistic upgrades. And finally, after hours and days, gray hairs and nausea, behold, a somewhat presentable and hopefully edible layer cake emerges.
To be completely honest, this year has been nothing short of a disaster. Partially due to this class, which it is my fault for taking the class in the first place when I was obviously not qualified to take an AP Literature class. It started out fun, but became more and more stressful as the year went on. My mental capacity has reached its limit, and my physical health isn 't in the best condition either due to the late nights I have spent on homework. However, despite it all, I have learned a great deal from this class. Not only from the curriculum, but I have also learned some of my own limitations and realized some faults that I need to mend. This class tested my patience and my temper, which I had only discovered
this area but I’m going to improve on it. The process of using multiple drafts has
I decided I was going to take English 1113 my junior year. I was worried that I was going to struggle writing college level papers because writing has never been my strong suit. I soon realized that it would not be as difficult because my professor gave me feedback on my rough drafts, so I would know what to improve in my paper. I knew before I even started writing my first paper that I would struggle with many aspects of writing, but I realized very quickly that I would struggle with common usage the most. I started off English 1113 struggling with comma errors throughout my papers, but through the course I have become more efficient with my writing, as well as improving my comma usage.
I decided that the topic of my essay would be about the daily writing routine that my mother implemented and how it affected my view of writing. Since this assignment was a personal narrative, the logical organizational method would be chronological order. However, I soon realized that that method would be difficult to determine since my view of writing changed gradually over the course of a year instead of instantaneously. I created a vague outline where I described the first day that I received a journal and began the routine, within the first few paragraphs. Next, I placed the lessons that I learned, realizations, and what I enjoyed in the proceeding paragraphs.
My relationship with writing has been an adventure having both its highs and lows—it has been complex. Yet through it all, I have been excited to learn, expand my vocabulary, learn new styles, and contribute to the ever-growing collection of literary work so that someone one day would benefit from my writing.
All throughout high school, I have taken advanced writing courses. I didn’t think I was a good writer, and I personally didn't think I learned how to write an essay until I took AP Language and Composition last year. College-level writing is important to me because it is very much needed and good to know how to write effective to achieve your goals and pursue your future career. Evidence from three of my EN 1113 papers this semester, suggest(s) that I’ve made great progress in explaining and elaborating on an issue, using detailed examples, and better understanding punctuation and grammatical errors in my writing. Reading through these papers, though, it’s clear I’m still working on improving using correct comma usage.”
College writers write multiple drafts and revise the entire essay or large sections of the essay for higher order writing concerns of meaning, structure, logical development, and concrete support of ideas and assertions. Revising the college essay is far more than simple editing for grammar and word choice. College essays must say something important and meaningful. Deep Revision helps to ensure that the essay says something interesting and worthwhile. Throughout High School I wrote for an educational finance website for high school students called, Investeens. I was the Head Writer for the “Tech Talk” section and reported on different sectors of the technology world as it related to finance. This was my first exposure to “professional” writing. As I sat down to write this essay I read over all the articles I wrote, and it was honestly painful. All I was doing was spewing out facts and observations without any support or general analysis. It disgusted me because I could see myself writing like that now, and I asked myself why that was. When we came into your class on the first day you begged the question, how does one learn to write? We all guessed haphazardly until someone finally said “through analysis”. I don’t think I fully understood what that actually meant. You described this as looking at the situation in front of you and asking why. Why did you write that? Why did you write it that way and not this other way? And by answering these simple questions you not only create a more meaningful essay but an understanding of yourself as the writer and that’s more important then anything you can ever write down. After taking this course I probably wont ever look at the essays I have written ever again, however, through writing t...
It is crucial for a student in the course, Writing for the Social Sciences, to know what their writing skills are, to have learning goals for the course and also know how they are going to achieve their goals. As a student new to this course, I also have writing skills I would like to improve on; learning goals and plans to achieve them as well.
organization, and word choice. All other essays were critiqued by my peers. With the help of
As the trimester comes to end, I look back on what I have achieved in writing class, and summarize what could I improve in the future. Learning a foreign language cannot be immediately improved, as learning is a process. Therefore, at the beginning of the semester, we were required to set a target for improving writing skill, so that there are four parts that will be mentioned, based on my writing weakness, the target, achievements and expectation for improving it.
Entering the high school, I knew it was going to be a challenge I was not prepared for. Towards the end of middle school, the teachers tried to scare us about how high school would really be. They talked about how the work would be super hard, how the teachers were going to be stricter, and how it wasn’t going to be easy at all. My first day was packed with homework. I wasn't expecting the teachers to give us homework on the first day; we never had homework on the first day in middle school. It sort of seemed unreal to me. I was hoping that everything would come easy in high school and I wouldn’t have to worry about cramming homework in almost every night.
While my sixth grade teacher informed me of the specific requirements of the essay, we were still given options and variety. We not only had to create a story, but we also had to include illustrations and dialogue. This request expanded creativity and provided another dynamic of the process; also, it allowed the writer to give voices to the characters. We were taught the fundamental elements of dialogue writing and it was reiterated through modeled examples and class exercises, nonetheless, we were forced to put it into practice, which functioned as a good assessment piece. Constantly, students are introduced to concepts that are not relevant to any other course material or life experience, the question is then asked, how can one make meaning from writing and instruction? The application of writing dialogue allowed me to utilize the methods taught, therefore, allowing me to make it meaningful to my writing experience and the overall development of my writing ability. Students should always be challenged based on their highest potential, in my instruction of writing, I think that students will learn best if the instruction is relevant and rigorous in order to create meaning and