...Writing is the ability to transfer your thoughts, feelings and oral language on a surface using specific symbols. The ability to convey your thoughts clearly in written form to the audience calls an effective writing skills. In addition to this an effective writer must have an extensive vocabulary to be able express yourself. To be an effective writer means the reader will understand thoroughly everything you are writing on the paper. My personal experience in writing was challenging and valuable at the same time. This semester I took an Academic Writing and Argument course with professor Missy Watson. During this semester, I learned how to analyze arguments, write rhetorical analysis essay, work with researched and visual arguments, effectively...
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...How do I . . . Write a Reflection? Why reflective writing? Reflection offers you the opportunity to consider how your personal experiences and observations shape your thinking and your acceptance of new ideas. Professors often ask students to write reading reflections. They do this to encourage you to explore your own ideas about a text, to express your opinion rather than summarise the opinions of others. Reflective writing can help you to improve your analytical skills because it requires you to express what you think, and more significantly, how and why you think that way. In addition, reflective analysis asks you to acknowledge that your thoughts are shaped by your assumptions and preconceived ideas; in doing so, you can appreciate the ideas of others, notice how their assumptions and preconceived ideas may have shaped their thoughts, and perhaps recognize how your ideas support or oppose what you read. Types of Reflection Experiential Reflection: Popular in professional programs, like business, nursing, forensics and education, reflection is an important part of making connections between theory and practice. When you are asked to reflect upon experience in a placement, you do not only describe your experience, but you evaluate it based on ideas from class. You can assess a theory or approach based on your observations and practice and evaluate your own knowledge and skills within your professional field. This opportunity to take the time to think ...
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...As my junior year winds down, the final chapter of my book is about to unravel: senior year. However, before I start exploring my horizons, which is going to be filled with new opportunities and memories to be made, it’s best to reflect on my experience in AP Language and Composition with Mrs.Miles throughout junior year. These past 8 months were filled with enlightening experiences. From the discussions and articles of the week to the countless essays we had to write. I believe that Mrs.Miles really focused on our writing skills, which I am awfully grateful that she did. Mrs.Miles has assisted in my growth in writing; as my grammar has improved, including the use of commas, colons, and semicolons. In fact, I am now knowledgeable of the fact...
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...Writing is a major part of any career. As a Health Science major, I did not realize how big of a role reading, writing and communicating plays in the health sciences field until I start taking my degree specific classes. All of the writing thus far has helped me realize how important being a good writer is, and helped me to see some of my strengths and weaknesses. I have never truly liked writing especially in the academic setting, but I know how important it is. Writing is a good way of expressing yourself and reflecting and analyzing your thoughts. I have never been confident in my writing skills, but I have seen major improvement over the year and hope to continue to grow as a reader and a writer. Improvements in My Writing I have saw...
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...My Learning Style Learning styles are part of a mental map that when dissected and analyzed, will help people to understand their learning anatomy, and hopefully will guide their future learning experiences to make the best use of their big and strong learning musculature. To start, the learning analysis and this writer learning styles and strategies will be introduced. Second, a comparison of my own and Vark’s analysis of strategies will be presented, and finally, an assessment of changes on study habits for this writer will be offered. First, our focus here will be the Styles included on the VARK analysis which questions are focus on the way we take-in and give-out information. These Learning styles are Visual, Aural, Red/Write, and Kinesthetic. My learning style is Multimodal (three model) with strongest points on the visual mode which was 12, kinesthetic 10, read/write 10, and Aural 4. As seen by the numbers, none of the three styles stands out. Translating this, it might take longer for this writer to feel confident about the understanding and retaining of the information because involves not only seen something, but , getting examples, pictures about it, writing about it and also having some practice or hands-on, that help to get the best of the learning endeavor. However this allows for flexibility of choosing the best styles for the specific learning experience. Definitely Aural learning style is not a great part of this student learning anatomy because she gets...
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...automatically connects it with reading and writing. Literacy, to me, is much more than that. Literacy is the “ability to read and write”, but I believe that literacy is a way to grow, discover, and express oneself. My ideal vision of literacy instruction would be to allow students to use reading and writing as a gateway to self-expression. Literacy can be used to grow not only as a person, but as a well-developed writer. A constraint to my vision of literacy would be the restricting mindset instructors enforce on their students. Students have been expected to write solely based on the “rules” taught by their teachers throughout their education. If students do not comply with these “rules”, they are punished with a bad grade. I strongly believe that students write in fear of bad markings and in fear of not pleasing their instructors’ needs. As students advance through the education system, they must advance in their writing skills as well. University students should be able to read and write at a higher level. High school and college instructors must be open to reason and consider that being so demanding with their criteria will only cause students to write at basic level. Instructors that have a stern grading policy are only keeping their students skills at a standstill. Some concerns with my vision of literacy would be that it can cause instructors to hold back on their grading’s, which could cause students to not improve or slack off. My vision is not to hold back instructors...
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...My first year at Alma College has been an eye-opening experience. I have learned a lot academically, about myself, and about life in general. As I progressed though the year my viewpoints had changed. I had many new experiences that broadened my horizon. My classes opened me up to knowledge I could apply to my life, that I found interesting, and benefitted me. I learned a lot about myself, including what I want out of my college experience, and what my passion is. Despite the numerous papers, multitudes of exams, tremendous amount of course work, and athletics I believe I have done well. One of the many demanding classes this semester was English 101. In this rigorous course, students were asked to gain rhetorical knowledge, engage in critical writing, perform research writing, and improve their style and grammar. These goals are closely related to those of the WPA Outcomes published by the Council of Writing Program Administrators. The WPA...
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...While writing this rhetorical analysis essay I have gained a significant amount of confidence in my rhetorical analysis writing ability. The main reason that I felt more confident was the experience I had from the Chipped Beef essay. I was able to go back and learn from my mistakes on that essay and correct those. That allowed me to be more confident in my writing ability and write a essay without questioning myself and knowing that I knew the correct way to do it. Many areas contributed to my success in this essay, but my most successful area in this essay was the ability to provide quality examples and to have strong analysis of those examples and how they relate to my thesis statement. In my opinion the main reasons I was able to find such successes in this area was because I knew what I did...
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...I do not have a much experience writing a rhetorical analysis. The last time I practiced with writing a rhetorical analysis was in High School but it did not consist of writing a 6 page paper. In High School we analysed short speeches but did not go in dept on writing multiple analysis. So when writing a rhetorical analysis on a blog for this semester I had to do more research on how to write a rhetorical analysis. The activities that were helpful were the outside assignment and class workshop. The outside assignments were helpful because they focus on teaching writing skills. When doing the assignments, it showed the pages to read and then gave a small test based on the readings. One of the assignments was on “Nouns and Pro-nouns” and it...
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...chance for students to research extensively and complete their own original work. From my point of view, it is designed to enable me to acquire all the insights and knowledge regarding to the training and development function as well as develop analytical, writing and judgmental skills. To be successfully producing the dissertation, I have to express skills in respect of critically assessing published information, demonstrating arguments and analyzing primary data to present a structured evaluation of a chosen research topic. Thus, the dissertation can be considered as the mechanism that allow me to gain valuable experiences in synthesizing theory, published studies, constructing methodological approaches, the proper selection and application of various methods, and analysis. I personally think that every aspect of the study has brought to me different and challenging experiences. Some sections of the research had been simple and interesting whereas others which I went through with much difficulties. To begin with, the first challenge is choosing a researchable topic, identifying the suitable research questions and establishing appropriate research methodology. In addition, throughout the study, I have to recognize the significance of remaining the key research questions and objectives in focus while writing various chapters so that I can avoid being sidetracked. Moreover, during the writing process, I have faced a challenge of quite...
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...considered my self a good writer. The idea of writing a “perfect paper” seemed like an unreachable concept. However, this year, my writing has improved greatly. I am not a five star writer, but i am reaching to better skills now, rather than where i was at the beginning of my freshman year. With the practice and building up my skills, i have improved in certain areas ad a writer. throughout this year, i have improved on the idea of properly analyzing evidence. For the book club unit towards the beginning of the year, I read the book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, which told the story of Christopher, a boy with autism. The essay focused on the idea of how Christopher had locus of control. The evidence worked for the point I was...
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...Before watching the introductory video to professional writing class (like ENGL394), I thought that sort of writing skills can be developed in a real workplace situation. Maybe because I am a mathematics major student, I never knew like readable proposals and professional analysis mean that much in a successful project. I am sure this professional writing class will provide a very good platform for applying what we’ve learnt into workplace. As a college-level writer, I’m driven by my purposes when writing. As what I’ve learnt a lot about argument, thesis statement and position paper from ENGL101 last semester, the most important thing for a writer to do is present enough evidence to audience in a logical structure. I didn’t do very well in it because I constantly failed to focus on my main thesis, which made my paper seem less convincing. To solve this problem, I tried my best to write down a structure of my paper and kept that script with me. It helped me to check out how far I got. According to Lamott’s First Shitty Draft, despite that such process may take a very long while, a writer should spend time on rewriting his/her own work. In my experiences of writing every single piece of assignment, only after reading my works over and over again could I be able to debug them. Another thing I learnt from Debunking the Genius Myth is that the essential way to success in writing is by practicing. Through enough practicing, one can automatically respond to a certain problem...
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...Using Facebook to Teach Rhetorical Analysis Jane Mathison Fife The attraction of Facebook is a puzzle to many people over the age of thirtyfive, and that includes most college faculty. Yet students confess to spending significant amounts of time on Facebook, sometimes hours a day. If you teach in a computer classroom, you have probably observed students using Facebook when you walk in the room. Literacy practices that fall outside the realm of traditional academic writing, like Facebook, can easily be seen as a threat to print literacy by teachers, especially when they sneak into the classroom uninvited as students check their Facebook profiles instead of participating in class discussions and activities. This common reaction reflects James King and David O’Brien’s (2002: 42) characterization of the dichotomy teachers often perceive between school and nonschool literacy activities (although they are not referring to Facebook specifically): “From teachers’ perspectives, all of these presumably pleasurable experiences with multimedia detract from students’ engagement with their real work. Within the classroom economy technology work is time off task; it is classified as a sort of leisure recreational activity.” This dichotomy can be broken down, though; students’ enthusiasm for and immersion in these nonacademic literacies can be used to complement their learning of critical inquiry and traditional academic concepts like rhetorical analysis. Although they read these texts daily...
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...Second Semester Final Exam: Portfolio A: Narrative/Descriptive Writing Parasailing (Vignette) Narrative and descriptive writing is the writing style I enjoy the most. The vignette I wrote about is a story that happened to me when I was younger and this kind of writing allows me to relive this memory on paper. I find this kind of writing easier to write and easy to relate to because it’s all about me. It is harder for me to write and relate to a book that we read in class since it isn’t about my personal life. This kind of writing style helps me reflect on the something I learned because I have seen how much I have grown this school year based off of what I wrote about and my writing style. This kind of writing style allows me to describe...
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...had in class allowed us to talk about my thoughts and those of my cohorts. Simultaneously, the studies helped to shape my initial experiences into a more unpredictable comprehension of the content. As I added to my perusing attitudes and insight into what literature is about, I have developed the capacity to make necessary disclosures about anything that I write or even read. Secondly, the academic resources from my lecturers gave us the foundation information that we need to excel in writing, both on reading the class resource books, extensive lectures, and independent research. Likewise, they have assisted us to exhibit our thoughts in a contemplated and thoughtful analysis. On a frequent basis, they would instruct us on points that they have a particular enthusiasm for and have taken a shot at broadly. Their exploration and analysis can be considered as the foundation stage of our interest in writing. To start with, in the contemporary society, there is by all accounts a move towards auxiliary school subjects that have a solid connection to a tertiary course of study. Hence, a there are few parents and a few understudies who feel that the aspect of writing, particularly among high schools, college, and universities is of great importance. For instance, students who devote their time on just English Language alone, with its accentuation on perusing and composing abilities, in some cases neglect to see the purpose of learning about writing. For instance, it happens if they have...
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