In this blog post, I will be sharing my overall feelings with you about my English Composition 100 class. This was my first English class in my college career, and I have to say it was one of the best classes I have ever been in.
Every Language Arts or English class I have taken has never interested me. I never considered myself a bad writer, but I never loved writing either. I found that writing was annoying and time consuming, and there was nothing or no one pushing me to actually enjoy the class. However, my English professor, Sabatino Mangini, was the first teacher to actually make me enjoy writing. One reason I started enjoying writing was by receiving help to improve my writing. In other English classes I took, we would plan an essay, outline the essay, write the essay, turn in the essay, and receive a grade for the essay. We rarely ever improved it besides spelling and grammar mistakes. In this class, we would focus on writing the essay first and then improving it second. Sabatino would push us to work and improve our first drafts to make a second draft. He encourages us to put in more showing scenes, feelings, thoughts, and even take out parts of the story to see how it would turn out. He explained how completing these possible improvements would improve our writing skills and make us better writers in the future. I completely agree with this statement because if you think about it, how would your writing improve if you don’t work on your previous mistakes? Improving my writing in this class helped me determine that I am going to improve my essays in my future classes. I will always be able to improve, and improving anything in my eyes makes me a better student. The second major reason I enjoyed this class so much was from the sense of closeness I felt with my classmates. Sabatino would start off class by asking how we were all doing. This gave a sense of comfort and fun in the classroom by sharing personal experiences and thoughts with each other really. I felt like I could express my opinion and agree and disagree with others without feeling judged. For example, during the first week of school, we all wrote a secret about ourselves that we have never told anyone before. Those secrets were then collected by Sabatino and written on the whiteboard – without naming who had what secret. We all then walked around the room and tried guessing what one another's secret was. After we found the majority of the answers, we all told our story about how our secret came about in our lives. Knowing each other’s secrets gave us a close feeling, kind of like “I know a secret about you, so were pretty much friends now.” I really liked having that feeling walking into the classroom because I didn’t feel like I was walking into a classroom full of strangers. I felt like I was walking into a classroom with students who have shared similar experiences as I have and students who have went through the same, semi-embarrassing experience of telling our secret story. Having this comfortable feeling around new people made me realize how much I like that feeling. From now on, I plan to break out of my shell a little bit and get to know the people around me, even if I have never seen them before. Looking back at when the class first started, I did not realize how much I would actually enjoy English Composition 100 in college. Looking at the class now, I’m really going to miss my classmates, my teacher, and the fun times we all experienced together.
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12/6/2017 0 Comments Student Choice: The LotteryIn this blog post, I will be discussing my thoughts and feelings about a short story we read in my English Composition 100 class called “The Lottery.” This short story overwhelmed me with thoughts and feelings that I will be sharing with you, and you may even agree with my thoughts and feelings too.
In the short story “The Lottery” written by Shirley Jackson, a village meets up once a year and conducts an annual lottery. All the men who live in the village choose a piece of paper from a hat. The man who draws the paper with the dot on it has to draw once again, this time with only his family. After his family all draws a piece of paper, the family member who picks the paper with the dot on it gets stoned to death by everyone in the village. For more information about this short story, you can visit this blog post. After reading this story, I was confused and horrified. I was confused because when I thought of a “lottery,” I imagined something good happening to people. For example, if someone tells you they won the lottery, they most likely just won a whole lot of money, which is definitely a good thing! I did not imagine a village drawing paper to determine someone’s death. I was horrified because I could not imagine real people stoning one of their acquaintances to death from picking a piece of paper. Doing that act is simply inhumane and cruel. I remember thinking “What kind of monster would come up with such a lottery?” After thinking about this “lottery,” I realized these horrible events happen right here in America. There are bombings, shootings, murders, and more horrid events that happen in this country. Although these awful events are not annually planned, they are planned by one person or by multiple people. Thinking about how people in this world would do this to another human being makes me scared to leave my house sometimes. A victim from these events could have never known they would be a victim from these horrible events. So you never know when something bad like bombings or shootings could happen to you. I’ll admit I am very afraid of death. I ask myself what is going to happen to me when I die, where would I go, and am I just gone forever? Though this is somewhat of a hard topic to talk about for me, talking about shootings and killings makes me accept death more. If I avoid this subject, I am never going to accept it which is not good for my mental health, physical health, and my overall health. Accepting that death will come for me some day will ensure that I will live a better and fulfilling life. I want to make the most out of my life before I die, and I think a lot of people do as well. Reading this article may have made me feel horrified, but it also got me to start thinking about death. Thinking about something that makes me uncomfortable makes me grow in the sense that I have to accept this will happen to me. I hope that one day, after talking and experiencing situations regarding death, I will fully accept death and let go of not knowing the unknown. In this blog post, I will be reflecting on my Life-Choice memoir assignment I wrote for my English Composition 100 course. I have been working on this essay off and on for about 2 months, and I will be sharing my process of writing it from my first draft until my last draft.
After receiving the assignment and reading this assignment sheet, I wrote my first draft. My first draft seemed to be more telling instead of showing. My teacher, Sabatino Mangini, specifically said to start the paper by jumping into a scene. When I looked back at my original essay, I did not jump right into a scene. I started the essay with “A high stakes life choice that I have made was…” This was exactly how not to start my life choice essay. After realizing my essay was not written how it was supposed to be, I started the essay again and pictured myself back in the first scene I wanted to include in my essay. I started describing everything I saw, felt, and thought. After describing as much as I thought I could, I added some ideas from my first draft and ended up with my second draft. One of the requirements for this assignment was to have one thousand to one thousand and five hundred words. When I looked at the word count of my second draft, I had two thousand four hundred and twenty two words. The word could was way over the required amount. When I talked to Dr. Mangini about my essay, he gave me a challenge to complete: eliminate seven hundred words from my second essay. This made me nervous. I was not sure if I would even be able to eliminate this many words without erasing parts that were important to the story. However, I was still up for the challenge. I went home that night and started eliminating words. First, I started eliminating the bonus “P.S” part at the end because it was not needed to tell my story. Then I started going through my essay from the beginning to the end. I started eliminating sentences that were not needed to enforce the point I was making. Then I went through the essay again and tried crunching words and phrases together to lessen the word count. After doing all of this, I only eliminated around four hundred and fifty words. I still needed around two hundred and fifty more to get rid of. This is when I started taking out descriptive parts of the essay that I wanted to try and leave in. After taking these wanted phrases out, I eliminated six hundred and eighty four words. I figured I pretty much reached the goal of my teachers challenge; therefore, making my third draft. After reviewing my third draft, I found I did not like this draft as much as my second draft. I feel like I took too many details out of the essay making the essay not as descriptive. However, I did like the challenge of eliminating a large quantity of words and seeing how that could improve my essay or not. Looking at the big picture, the process I took to get to my third draft was a little painful; however, it was well worth the pain because I feel that I have improved my essay substantially. I realized that going back into my essay and revising my first draft improved my writing skills and improved my essay overall. |
Julia ThorntonI am using this blog for my English course and beyond Archives
December 2017
CategoriesAll Life Choice Making Connections Memoir Proust Questionnaire Reflection Research Paper Student Choice Summary Where To Invade Next Writing Process |