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Analysis of the writing process
Analyzing your writing process
Analyzing your writing process
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Class Reflection My English teacher in high school taught us the standard five paragraph organization for an essay. But, I never liked that organization because I felt by following that process my essay would lose its uniqueness. When I started this class I thought this course would be like all the others I have taken in the past, all following the same pattern, but this was different. When we started our first essay “Writing to Share an Experience” the directions to the students were “organize and use the rules to your benefit.” To me, this was freedom to express my ideas. I was no longer bound by the five paragraph organization. I could try and experiment new styles in my writing process. During this course my writing has evolved a great …show more content…
The first essay “Writing to Sharing Experience” was intended to get you comfortable with expressing yourself and getting to know what your high and low points. It worked, I was more comfortable writing about a personal experience and this essay showed me with the places I needed to improve. The second essay “Writing to Explore” was intended to make you research on your topic and inform you the format that is required for an informative essay. I learned the format that is required by an informative essay and the how to properly use intent quotations. The next essay analyzing a movie required great observation skills and look for your analytic process. Proceeding with this essay was challenging for me because I had never written an essay about a movie. This essay required you to understand the hidden meanings behind thins, I had to watch the movie couple of time to get all the information needed for this essay. Lastly, The persuasive essay which is a combination of all the essays. It consists of you forming your opinion, having a proper format and research and, analyzing all the information presented to you and picking that supported your opinion the best. With each essay I felt growth in my writing
In an excerpt of Unteaching the Five-Paragraph Essay," Marie Foley reveals how the Five-Paragraph Essay formula contradicts writing instructor's most basic goals. Foley shows that the formula deters from generating individual thinking. In today's society, essays are used by millions of people in order to express their different ideas. The Five-Paragraph Essay formula was originally developed to help retain the efficiency and clarity of the essay. Foley, however, believes that this process eventually separates the student from his or her written expression and should be used only as a first step tool for beginning student writers. Foley insists that the formula blocks discovery, squelches authenticity and undermines the reader's need for coherence. Foley shows that patterns of organization and more natural thinking can benefit the student.
“Unteaching the Five Paragraph Essay” by Marie Foley demonstrates how a five paragraph essay formula disturbs the thought process of the students and limits what they can write. A five paragraph essay is an introduction with the main idea, with three supporting topics showing the relationship to the main idea, and a conclusion summarizing the entire essay. Foley argues that this formula forces students to fill in the blank and meet a certain a word limit. She noted that this formula was intended for teachers in the education system to teach an overcrowded class how to write. While it is beneficial for the first-time students learning how to write. In the long run, this standard destroys any free style writing, new connections between a topic,
However, though John Warner’s argument is strong, Kerri smith’s argument is stronger. In Kerri Smith’s article “In Defense of the Five-Paragraph Essay,” She claims that the five-paragraph essay should stay taught in schools as a guideline for a well-structured essay. She explains the five-paragraph essay as an “introduce-develop-conclude structure” that even great expository writing follows this structure (Smith 16). She purposefully communicates to her audience this idea to show that this structure gives students the knowledge and capability to write a professional essay. The five-paragraph essay includes the three key points to have a well-structured and organized essay. By mentioning that other great writers use this form of structure, she creates a stronger argument as to why the five-paragraph essay is important to education. She continues her article by explaining her early stages of writing and how she was taught; over time, her teachers would show her new ways to improve her writing which, in the end, she was told to think “of those five paragraphs simply as a mode of organization” (Smith
Essays are not just the standard five paragraphs and then done style that was taught to students in grade school. The article “The Sixth Paragraph: A Re-Vision of the Essay” by Paul Lynch, explains quiet well how essays are typically taught and why. It is basically because it is easy to grade and even easier to write. Even when talking about writing or giving an example to a person it’s quite typical to start using the five paragraph format. While writing the standard essay the guidelines are quite specific. BE precise, stick to the topic, and stay impersonal. However, the author states that this made her realize that essays can be confining instead of teaching. So instead the author decided to listen to her students and quit focusing on the
The way it shaped what I was writing was that I would choose topics that I knew very well so that it made it easier for me to just write from things I new and in that way meet the requirements and so it never allowed me to take time and research or acquire new learning. I have written a five-paragraph essay for a class assignment particularly following the “Spart Write” formula. My experience with this was that I was just trying to meet certain criteria and that's all I really cared about. By having to write in such a structure manner it didn't allow me to learn new things. Based on my own experiences and on the readings, the most important characteristics of an academic student essay would be to follow some sort of structure where it doesn't allow you to wander aimlessly but not to structure that it doesn't allow you to learn or explore new ideas. Also mention in “The Age of Essay” having that surprise element because it allows you to learn new things and it might even lead you to contradict things you already
We would do research on a subject or a person, and write about them. We, once again, were not allowed to be unique in our writing or think creatively or critically. This is the time when I was taught the five paragraph essay. As stated in Gray’s article, the five paragraph essay is detrimental to students’ writing. This format for writing is damaging because it doesn’t allow students to express their own ideas about a topic. It does not allow for any creativity or uniqueness in a paper. In tenth grade, I wrote many papers for my English class, but I never once got an A on them. I was led to believe that my writing was weak because I could not relate to what I was writing about. I did not have any emotional connection to the research papers I had to write, and it made it harder for me to write them. I had grown up not being allowed to think critically, and therefore, my papers in high school lacked creativity and deeper
The strengths in my writing are my organizational skills, grammatical construct, and my work ethic. Organizing an essay is a very natural process for me. I always follow the basic guidelines for the structure of an essay, which state that one must have an introduction, thesis statement, body, conclusion, and a works cited when needed. The “Are Helicopter Parents Entering the No Fly Zone?” essay, “Animal Cloning—How Unethical Is It?” essay, and the “The Clean Water Act—Is it Successfully Reducing Water Pollution?” essay all have a proper introduction, an informative thesis statement, a body, great conclusions, and works cited pages. Formatting the essays is an integral aspect of organizational skills. Each new paragraph is indented, the font is twelve-point Times New Roman, the sentences are double spaced, and the headers are correct.
Strategies and techniques that a person uses are those that allow you to write great papers. There are no rules on how an essay should be written; the only expectations are to get your main point across to your audience. Whether you are writing a persuasive essay, an informal essay, literary essay, argumentative essay, or a compare and contrast essay you name it there is always a purpose. One individual can follow a linear process and can edit it and precede all over with the following steps. Your fellow class mate might have a different way to write or even have similarities within. Writing takes time, patience, and overall practice. Just like how Hairston relates writing to the best athletes. Athletes are not born the best but through practice, time, criticism, and reinforcement it can lead them to become the
Writing is a process I’ve grown to despise. Ever since grade school, I’ve had problems trying to express my ideas on paper. My writing process involves thinking about what’s being asked and trying to reflect my thoughts the best way I can on paper, but my thoughts don’t always come out as clear as I want them to be sometimes leaving a question not fully answered. My writing process isn’t a consistent set in stone process, but since being in ENC 1101 I always follow some of the same parameters such as revising my drafts, grammar usage and considering context and audience.
Unit 1 taught me to focus on each step in the writing process. Approaching the task
I am sitting in my bed, thinking about my process of writing as I am trying to go through it. It seems the more I think about it, the less I understand it. When I am writing, I don’t think. Which I know, sounds bad. But, I spend every single moment of every single day over thinking, over analyzing, and over assuming every aspect of my life. When I’m writing, I’m free from that for just a little bit. Until of course, my hands stop typing or the pencil (no pens- never pens) stops moving, then I’m right back on the carousel that is my brain. Heidi Estrem says, “...writers use writing to generate knowledge that they didn’t have before.” (Writing is a Knowledge-Making Activity 18). I believe my ability to write without an exact destination
As a writer, my greatest strength is to layout the essay as introduction, body and conclusion and especially thesis. In EAP, I was taught carefully in this regard, the construction of introduction, a thesis is the main factor because it is the main point of the essay. However, arranging ideas and put them into sentences are not my strong. For example, in the essay, there were a lot of ideas and arguments that I collected and I put them randomly in paragraph...
In this course I have learned and written many essays from as small as reading responses to writing an argumentative paper. All the essays had a similar style of writing and that is that it had to have a thesis, body paragraphs, and a conclusion except for the major assignments like LEN, Argumentative Paper, Lit Review, and etc., which required more than just those three elements to writing the essay. I prefer one type of writing style to another because it lets me see the difference in my writing and if there are improvements in my writing. I do see similarities in the different essays I wrote and they are that my thesis statements are not strong enough, which is why my essays are not strong enough. Choosing a good thesis statement and having good body paragraphs are crucial to writing essays because that is the key part of the essay, which I needed work on all semester.
In the past, I used to start writing an essay without writing an outline. I even did not brainstorm before I began to write. As a result, my essays were undoubtedly messy and disorganized. For instance, after I finished writing my Paper 2, I asked my professor for suggestions. He advised me to rearrange the order of paragraphs since my essay was disorganized and disordered. At that moment, I finally realized that if I did not plan out what I was going to write, my essay would be less likely to be logical because outline is like a base and foundation of an article. Hence, I started writing an outline from then on. For example, I nowadays would like to write my thesis statement down first. After that, I will briefly write down what I will talk about in body paragraphs. After using pre-writing skills and techniques, I notice that my essays are much more organized; and thus, my essays are no...
Thomas Carlyle once said, “A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder. At the beginning of this class, I had only one question in mind. What makes a good writer great? What set of qualities do they have that makes them such remarkable writers? And I wanted to evaluate those qualities that makes them so unique. In order for me to accomplish that, I need to take a class where student read and write extensively. A class that makes a student think outside the box. Intro to creative writing was a perfect class for me. The class teaches things that makes people think differently, that makes you look at writing in a different perspective. My goal in this class is still wanting to be a great writer. A writer who thinks outside the box, a creative writer. One thing I think to myself is that when I look back, to the first day of this class, I didn’t really understand poetry much. Which made me kind of sad because poetry writing has a