...semester of Intro to Expository Writing, my academic writing has greatly improved. My writing started as “Elementary school was like a fairytale; there was a pretty princess and a handsome prince, but I was an evil villain.” And has grown to “Through her diction, Walls creates various tones in order to convey to her audience that despite obstacles, it is possible to escape from a dysfunctional family in hopes of a brighter future.” Using How to Say Nothing in 500 Words, I will be evaluating my own writing by discussing my strengths, weaknesses, and how I have grown as a writer. Writing narratives have always been a personal struggle for me. Unless I passionately come up with a story, and immediately write it on paper, my narratives are bland. It is hard to write personal life-changing stories when I have a deadline. One weakness of mine is using colorful words. For example, a sentence from my personal narrative was written as “It was magnificent with its stained green carpet and plenty of wooden bookshelves stocked with colorful books.” In retrospect, this is how it could have been written, “The spacious library had wooden bookshelves stuffed with leather-bound books, which rested on gritty emerald carpet.”...
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...Writing and Myself | Matthew McMahonUNIV104-1402B-18: Academic and Career SuccessJune 22, 2014 | When I first enrolled into this course, I felt all different kinds of emotions and wasn’t exactly sure what to expect from UNIV104. I would have thoughts in my head leading up to this class spinning in my head every night before the first day. Some thoughts like, “Maybe this will be my best class!” and “This class will be easy because I love writing!” were good thoughts that helped me boost my confidence about my college course. Other thoughts loomed in my head as well such as, “Do I really belong in this class?”, and “I’m probably going to fail this class with just one assignment!” Such thoughts as these brought my spirits and gave me a pessimistic outlook on this class. But now that I am done with this class, I find myself to be more at ease with myself and have a newfound confidence in the way that write. Writing has been an important form of expression for me. I find myself to be very soft spoken and speaking verbally is usually difficult for me because I can’t always seem to find the right words to say. This has led me to be very shy in class. With writing, I feel that I am more expressive and have more control over what I want to say. Writing is therapeutic for me, whatever I cannot say directly I can just pour out my heart and soul. I have been keeping a journal for the past eight years and it has done wonders for me. I find myself not only...
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...Sometimes I wonder if I’m going to get this huge growth spurt in my writing in one day and just magically turn into an award-winning writer overnight, but huge growth spurts in writing never happen overnight so that thought is probably unrealistic. Growing as a writer happens over time and through many trial-and-error pieces of work. No good writer has started out at their best, but instead, they grow into it because they learn new things in the course of their writing career. Over the course of this semester, I have grown more as a writer than I did in the first three years of high school combined, so yes, I did have a growth spurt as a writer, but it didn’t happen all at once and I am not finished growing. This semester, I have had to write...
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...000 km) in trips to almost all the Muslim countries and as far as China and Sumatra. Henry James (American writer): Career—first phase ...of the novel Roderick Hudson, the story of an American sculptor’s struggle by the banks of the Tiber between his art and his passions; Transatlantic Sketches, his first collection of travel writings; and a collection of tales. With these three substantial books, he inaugurated a career that saw about 100 volumes through the press during the next 40 years. Samuel Johnson (English author): Journey to the Hebrides ...the inducement of having Boswell as his companion. He was propelled by a curiosity to see strange places and study modes of life unfamiliar to him. His book, a superb contribution to 18th-century travel literature, combines historical information with what would now be considered sociological and anthropological observations about the lives of common people. (Boswell’s complementary narrative... Marco Polo: Compilation of Il milione ...to write about his 25 years in Asia but possibly did not feel sufficiently comfortable in either Venetian or Franco-Italian; however, with Rustichello at hand, the traveler began dictating his tale. The language employed was Franco-Italian—a strange composite tongue fashionable during the 13th and 14th centuries. Paul Theroux American novelist and travel writer known for his highly personal observations on many...
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...its height in Europe between 1900 and the middle 1920s. Modernist literature addressed to aesthetic problems and can be viewed largely in terms of its formal, stylistic and semantic movement away from Romanticism, examining subject matter that is traditionally mundane. It often features a marked pessimism, a clear rejection of the optimism apparent in Victorian literature. It attempted to move from the bonds of Realist literature and to introduce concepts such as disjointed timelines. Modernism as a literary movement is seen, in large part, as a reaction to the emergence of city life as a central force in society. Furthermore, an early attention to the object as freestanding became in later Modernism a preoccupation with form. Modernist writers were more acutely conscious of the objectivity of their surroundings. The most prominent modernist authors are: T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, Knut Hamsun, Gertrude Stein, Mikhail Bulgakov, MarcelProust, John Steinbeck, Ezra Pound, Katherine Anne Porter, Rainer Maria Rilke, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, Boris Pasternak, Sherwood Anderson and a lot of others. Modern short stories only occasionally consist of an exposition. It usually comprises of an abrupt beginning, with the story starting in the middle of the action. The plots of short stories also have a climax, crisis, or turning-point. The...
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...Renaissance" because of the number of emerging black writers. After graduating from high school, Hughes went to Mexico to visit his father, in hopes to convince his father that he should pay for his college education at Columbia University in New York City. On his way to Mexico on the train, while thinking about his past and his future, Hughes wrote the famous poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." After arriving in Mexico, the tension between Hughes and his father was strong. Hughes wanted to be a writer; his father wanted him to be an engineer. After Hughes sent some of his poetry to what was known as the “Brownies” Book and “Crisis” magazines, it was accepted. his father was impressed enough to agree to pay for a year at Columbia University. It was there at Columbia University were he begin releasing more poems that he had written. Hughes embraced crafting blues music into his poetry because it expressed the worries of the common man in a simple and direct manner. Blues songs feature heavy repetition, and singers often seem to be laughing and crying at the same time. One of his best works was the poem “The Weary Blues” which came in first place in a section of a literary contest in an Opportunity magazine published in 1925. The title itself gives an example on how Hughes wanted to give the reader an indication on how he crafted his fine arts. This poem became one of the most well known poems and helped launched his career. In the poem “The Weary Blues” The speaker describes...
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...Young writers are often so caught up in learning to write that they may never experience writing to larn, not just to learn about a particular project but to learn about themselves, their values, their experiences, their environment. As teachers of composition, at some point in our careers we have undoubtedly experienced writing apprehension. We can understand why some develop an aversion to writing and would do almost anything to avoid it. WRITING APPREHENSION DEFINED the term as the tendency to experience high degrees of anxiety when asked to write, resulting in an approach-avoidance conflictive state which manifests itself in one’s behaviors, attitudes, and written products. Behaviors 1. They tend to select careers which they perceive to require little or no writing. 2. They tend to avoid courses and majors which require writing on a daily basis. 3. They write very little out of class. 4. They lack role models for writing at home, in school, and in the society at large. 5. They score lower on tests of verbal ability (SAT), reading comprehension, and standardized tests of writing ability used for college placement. 6. They do not necessarily lack motivation. Attitudes 1. Their self-concept is often lower, and they may lack self-confidence. 2. They report low success in prior experiences with school-related writing. 3. They have received negative teacher responses to prior writing attempts. 4. They are more apprehensive when writing personal narratives in which...
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...HOW TO WRITE A RESUME FOR BUSINESS SCHOOL: The resume you use to get a job is different from the resume you should submit to your schools. The two serve different purposes and should be written in different formats. For instance, a job resume often begins with "career objectives." That's inappropriate for business school. You'll cover that issue in your application essays, so leave it out your resume. The business schools want you to use a certain format when writing your resume. Don't write a "narrative" resume. That is, don't try to explain your background in the form of a story. Instead, use "bullet items" to explain your accomplishments. I actually like the narrative format better when it's done well. It gives applicants a chance to tell their story in a conversational manner. The problem is that the narrative resume is rarely done well (because most people aren't particularly good writers). So it's best to play the game and use the bullet format that business schools are looking for. The Order in Which You Want to Address Your Personal History Don't start your resume with your educational information. Doing so makes you look like a recent college grad who lacks significant work experience. The schools want worker bees, not college students. Start your resume with work, then included community involvement and activities, and finally address your education. You also want to make it easy for the admissions people to find the information they're looking...
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...from the consistent inadequacy of the means at hand to wrestle with the problems to be faced, whether they be poverty, racial intolerance, or the preservation of an historical past rich in tradition. In the years after the Civil War, the Southerner attempted to deny these things by the simple, but ultimately ineffectual, process of ignoring them. The Southern local colour writers concentrated on the quaint, the eccentric, and the remote; and the creators of the “plantation tradition” idealised the past. Against this sentimental view the first two voices that were strongly raised were those of Ellen Glasgow and James Branch Cabell, Virginians who in their differing ways defined the patterns which 20th-century Southern fiction was to take when it became serious and fell into the hands of that group of writers of talent who have practised it in that century. In other words, when this group of talented young writers in the 1920’s and 30’s addressed themselves to the representation of the world through the image of their region, they followed the paths blazed by Miss Glasgow and Cabell. These writers were not only Southern but they were also the products of the same social and cultural forces that were shaping the world of...
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...psychologism. However, it was characterized by its attention to details, as well as its attempt to recreate reality as it was, without any decorative language. It tried to reproduce the most detail and objective life of Great Britain before and after World Wars. Realism represented the social life and paid much attention to domestic problems. Its representatives showed tragic vision of life using satire and dark humour, but still their vision of life is much more optimistic than the modernistic one. Talking about their characters, they were social types depicted in their everyday life dealing with their virtues, morals, profession, relationships, worldview etc. Narrative form used by realists is characterized by several narrative characters in order to create an objective vision of life. The most prominent among the writers who continued the traditions of realism were: J. Galsworthy, A. Bennett, H. Wells, B. Shaw; and their followers R. Aldington, G. Orwell, J. Priestley, and E. Waugh. The Novel is certainly the most important literary form of the period. The realistic novel is represented by such novelistic forms as: the social and social-psychological novel (J. Galsworthy, E. Waugh, R. Aldington) the social-domestic novel (A. Bennett, H. Wells) the comic or satirical novel (E. Waugh) family chronicle or epic cycle (J. Galsworthy) science fiction (H. Wells). Despite all this, realism and his representatives suffered much criticism. The main argument developed...
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...wonderful childhood I had had. How I had seen the whole frontier, the woods, and the Indian country of the great plains …” (Laura Ingalls Wilder) Laura Ingalls Wilder is best known for her “Little House on the Prairie” series and for her contribution to children’s literature. There were several things that factored into shaping Wilder as a writer a major one being her personal experience of growing up on the frontier with her family. It was not until later in her life that she wrote the series and the series had gotten published. Over the following years of its publication her books have made it on library and school reading lists as well as been awarded. In American literature Laura Ingalls Wilder is one of the most...
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...05054500 – Lesson 6 – Writing With Sources ME, A WRITER? Attitude: Describe your attitude toward completing this course. As part of the description, explore how your feelings about being required to take a composition course may affect your performance in accomplishing the course objectives. (1 paragraph, 5 sentences) Inventory: Explain what you learned about yourself as a writer working through the inventory exercise. Discuss two ways you want to improve as a writer and why. (1 paragraph, 5 sentences) REQUIRED JOURNAL ENTRY 2: PREWRITING Brainstorming: Brainstorm about specific positive and negative effects computers have had on your personal, professional, and academic life. Create a one-page list of your ideas. Thesis: Based on your brainstorming, write a one-sentence working thesis statement that focuses on the impact of computers related to a single area of your life (personal, professional, or academic). The thesis should be one you could develop into an essay of about one page (250-300 words), directed to readers of your local newspaper. Don't draft the essay in your journal, however. You need only your list from brainstorming and your working thesis statement. REQUIRED JOURNAL ENTRY 3: DRAFTING This entry builds on the brainstorming and thesis you developed for Journal Entry 2. Evidence: Identify three different types of evidence you could use to develop your working thesis from Entry 2. Use specific...
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...‘REEL WOMEN’ 75% of blockbuster crews are male, how severe is sexism in the film industry? This 20 minute long documentary is based on women’s careers in the film industry, how they may be underrepresented, why this inequality persists and how this may have increased throughout the years. Actresses and women from around the world are calling out sexism in the film industry. “Is there a lack of material and great stories for women to work with?” These questions will be answered through a compilation of archive footage and interviews with female students to understand how younger women aspiring in strong career paths feel about it – and also women that are already in the industry who experience the inequality first hand. This leads to my first contributor which will introduce narrative and to give the audience a strong storyline to follow: Carla Lacey is 46. She has recently graduated from Manchester University and wants to excel in her dream of becoming a successful screenwriter. She grew up always wanting to be a singer but suffered with heavy bipolar, restricting her from following her dreams. Carla wrote poems and two novels which are published in books and on the internet – with this not being good enough for her she researched into screenwriting and now aspires to work with many other female screenwriters in the industry. She is passionate about the empowerment of women and wants more material for women to work with in the industry as she feels there isn’t enough...
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...ideology.38 Stemming from this approval, Machiavelli goes on to write in The Art of War about the need for militia rule within a society so that one’s societal involvement can be maximized and patriotism and unity affirmed for the stability of the community.39 Again, by using mostly unquestioned primary sources, most of Oppenheimer’s narrative does play into the hands of the counter-argument, as not only do his choices of...
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...Fiction we must understand what American Literature is in itself and which pieces of writing we can include within this label. It is believed that when a piece is written in North America, more precisely in the USA, it would automatically be given this epithet. But it should be taken into account that this idea is quite broad and doesn’t reflect the real essence of the term. However, there is also another definition that gathers this essence: American Literature is the one that represents the Americanism, the singularity of the USA philosophy and culture. This way, instead of focusing on who the author is, it is focused on the content of the writing. In that which concerns Fiction, the following documents are the ones considered as narrative: Speeches Letters Short Stories Essays Political Documents Sermons Novels Diaries 1 FIRST LITERARY EXPRESSIONS The first documents in which the idea of Americanism is very present are the Sermons. They respond to the strict Protestantism settled in the New Continent after the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers and Puritans in the Mayflower (1620) and the Arabella (1630). They established a theocratic community whose main and only point of reference was the Bible. That is why the idea of the ‘city upon a hill’ is still very present in American mentality. As we all know, their community was also governed by the concept of Predestination. This belief was based...
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