Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts” is an excerpt from her book, Bird by Bird (1994), where she argues to let go of the anxieties and fears of creating a masterpiece paper right away by simply writing without question in order to get all of your thoughts out first. She refers to this style of writing to one of a child’s while also reminding the reader to just freely write knowing that no one else will be seeing this initial draft. It’s clear Lamott wants to connect with her readers and help ease
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In the essay “Neat People vs. Sloppy People”, Suzanne Britt describes the distinct difference between neat people and sloppy people. She states that neat people are actually lazier and meaner than sloppy people. Britt supports her generalization with a few detailed examples, and she begins by explaining how sloppy people aren’t really sloppy. The sloppiness is simply a byproduct of the sloppy people living in a dream world where they have a precise plan. The sloppy people tell themselves that they
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I wrote this essay for the University of New Mexico. The essay prompt asked me to describe a specific example of a time when I displayed leadership. I wrote many essays while applying for colleges. An essay centered around leadership showed up for almost every university I applied to. For this specific essay I decided to elaborate on my experience leading a Positive Action program and my time working with kindergartners. The essay had to be less than 350 words. The short length requirement was another
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didn’t need to improve on much. I was oh so wrong, there was a lot that needed to be improved on and thankfully through the course of this semester i have been able to improve on those things. The improvements came about from the different type of essays that we had to write and it brought a whole lot of strengths from it. Although in the past years we have learned on how to write a lot of these papers this year we dove a little more into them. We took different approaches to them to get more out
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If I am writing a paper, work e-mail, or discussion post for an online course I tend to use the same writing process. I would say it is a mix of both Anne Lamott’s described process in “Shitty First Drafts” and the 3x3 writing process in Guffey. My writing is usually done in 3 stages but sometimes only 2, when the prewriting and drafting stage blend together or if I am preparing something like and e-mail that does not need as much prewriting as a paper or discussion post might need. The first thing
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After reflecting on my position essay, I was most pleased with the points of argument I choose for why government invasion of personal privacy is wrong. I believe that my arguments were solid and I backed them up with valid evidence. I also felt that my opposing argument was strong. The things that contributed to my achievement were all the assignments that led up to writing the position essay. I took a lot of information from the weekly assignment, ‘Argument, Concession, and Refutation.’ I felt
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meanings that would normally go unnoticed unless it was analyzed on a deeper level. Another weakness I had showed itself while I was writing “The Tempest and Source Material” and “Heart of Darkness and Postcolonial Criticism”. While writing these two essays I had to find effective ways to use quotations from both the text and source material to make my point. This was hard because I found it a tad hard to fully utilize the quote in a way that it supported or complimented my claims. It was when you taught
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My essay provides a clear and thorough refutation of Vliet’s arguments that follow the specific “defend the status quo” refutation strategy. Throughout my argument I used specific strategies that helped defend the current policy. I believe that my essay clearly refutes Vliet’s argument by providing counter examples from reliable sources to help counter her claims. Another strategy that I used in my essay was the identification of logical fallacies that Vliet stated in her argument. While searching
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Writing History intro1 Writing has always been challenging for me. Through secondary school, I was very lazy and did not pay much attention in my English classes because it was never something I was interested in. When I got to college it was made very clear that I had to step up learn how to write better or I wasn’t going to make it. I spent many of evenings in the writing place getting help from the tutors. They were extremely helpful in furthering my writing skills. By the time I
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Although all experts agree that the writing process is made up of several stages. Not everyone agrees on what part is the most important. Some believe that prewriting is the key to producing a good paper, others think that revising is the most important step. My teachers emphasized all areas. Pointing out that prewriting techniques could be used at any time during the writing of a paper and showing me that revising also occurred constantly as I wrote my rough drafts. Coming up with a good idea to
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