Tuesday, January 28, 2014
The Year all Wrapped Up
Dear Reader,
As the year progressed I have become a more mature and better writer. I have learned many techniques to use any many fallacies not to use. In college next year i will be able to help out friends and peers. This class has been very helpful because it has improved my quality of work. By improving the work that I produced, the reader will be more entertained with reading pieces of writing.
This year we wrote essays in four major categories . Those four major categories are narrative, expository, descriptive and persuasive. Each piece has their own respective purpose. The narrative's purpose is to tell a story. The story can be told in first, second, or third person. Each way can be used to write a successful paper. Narrative pieces of writing also
include conflict, setting, characters, a plot, a climax, and a theme. To have a successful writing piece one must use these pieces to the best of their ability.
The next category of writing we executed was the expository piece. The expository piece's main goal is to inform the reader about something the writer is trying to show them a side of an event, person or thing. Expository writing can be shown in different types of writing such as: definition, compare and contrast, cause and effect and classification or division. Compare and
contrast can happen in two ways. One way is point by point and the other is subject by subject. "My sister is built like an athlete.
She ran track as well as played field hockey. These two sports include conditioning and eye hand coordination. To play sports of this kind one must have a lot of skill in a certain type of area. Field hockey isn’t like track but they both need special skills to play and it requires an athlete to play them.
I also have the athletic body type, however I play two completely different sports. The sports that play take a different type of athlete but they still take a very demanding person. These two sports can be very difficult on ones body." This is an example of subject by subject. I am happy with the way this paper turned out because of the two different ways of getting the
same point across to the reader.
The third type of writing we performed this year was descriptive. The purpose of descriptive writing is to describe an item, event or person. In order to do this one must use descriptive details commonly known as sensory details. These sensory details go along with other techniques such as word choice, figurative language, vivid verbs, colorful adjectives, proper nouns, dialogue and using the technique show don't tell. The best descriptive papers include a dominant impression showing that there is a certain trait that connects the paper. The reader should know the dominant impression without the writer telling them blatantly what the dominant impression is. I opened my descriptive paper by defining what the item was that I was writing about. 'The lanyard is “any of various small cords or ropes for securing or suspending something, as a whistle about the neck or
a knife from one's belt.”' "The Good, The Bad, The Lanyard" was one of the best papers that I wrote this year. I am especially happy in the way that the history fit itself in and that the paper went in chronological order. Many of the techniques that I used I would love to use again. The only concern that I had for this paper was the repetition. It can be hard to think of new things to
say about a lanyard.
The final type of writing we learned about this year in College Composition was persuasive writing. The main reason people write persuasively is to convince someone towards a certain side of an argument. The writer must use at least one of the five appeals. The five appeals are appeal to principle, appeal to authority, appeal to character, appeal to emotion and appeal to logic. These five appeals can be fit into three categories; Ethos, Pathos and Logos. Logos is appealing to what one thinks. Pathos is appealing to what is in ones heart and Ethos is appealing to what one observes other people doing. The writer is often suggested to use one or more of these appeals to make their argument stronger and make it easier to convince the reader to your side. After this year in College Composition I am now very familiar with these categories and sub-categories upon these
types of writing.
I believe before this course I wasn't the strongest writer but now that I have completed this course I believe that my writing has some meaning behind it. When I was coming into this class I was expecting to be hit hard with loads of papers and topics to write about. Others thought it would be completely different. They thought it would be a fight to get the seats near their friends, or a period to drink seven Coca-Colas or a time to watch inappropriate Skittles commercials. Overall after having some fun we learned techniques, and strategies in order to be able to write a well developed paper. My expectations for this class exceeded what I expected it to be this year. When the course has "college" in the name I would have thought it would of been very rigorous with lots of writing and I would have no idea what was going on. I stayed up to date on the current type of
writing and became a successful writer. I learned to connect with the reader better than I have ever been able to before. I did this by using appeals to the reader and sensory details to develop a dominant impression. By using these techniques for their respective papers I felt a bond
to the paper that I have never felt before. This bond was also felt by the reader as well because my emotion was put into this writing.
My papers throughout the year have improved tremendously. In the beginning of the year the topics I wrote about were very dry and boring. Towards the end of the year the writing that was produced was of much better quality. I believe the activity that helped me the most was studying the examples from the professional authors that were experts in that category. This helped me because I got to see the "ideal" way to write. Previous examples from past years have been other students and they didn't help out because most of the time we were writing about the same topic. I became tempted to steal their ideas and it created a block in my mind of how to write about the same topic. By using author's pieces, it helped me notice the techniques used to show the main topic or impression of the paper. Overall I have improved as a writer because of all these new techniques and strategies.
My two main improvements in writing this year were creating meaningful titles and writing hooking introduction paragraphs. In previous writing classes I was never taught a title could be the means of reading a paper or not. A title grabs the reader's attention and intrigues them to read the paper. Titles can be provocative where they have different meanings and makes the reader wonder what the paper is actually about. The title may also pose a question about the topic that may be interesting to the reader. The first paragraph the reader reads after the title is the introduction paragraph. The introduction paragraph is the most important part of the paper. It determines if the reader is interested in reading on or abandoning it. Other introductions I have written have been boring and had no attracting power to the reader. The introductions that were written this year were
much more in depth. They were different because the thesis was not always at the end of the introduction. It was sometimes the very first line and sometimes not even in the introduction at all. This year helped me improve my ability to write a well developed
essay starting off with the title and then the introduction next.
This year in College Composition my writing has improved greatly. I learned the different types of writing such as narrative, expository, descriptive and persuasive. This following portfolio will show my improvement over the year because of this class.
