...assigned papers. I shuddered at the sheer thought of having to write five papers. Narrative, Evaluation, Profile, Position. These words might as well have been written in another language because I had no idea how to differentiate between them. Despite my fears, I believe this semester’s English 101 course has truly helped me develop my writing skills and advance to a more capable writer. Throughout my life English has always been my most difficult subject. Even back in elementary school I would have 100 percent averages in all of my other classes except English. I do not know what it was that challenged me so much but I had a terrible time. With the start of my high school career coincided the beginning of my paper writing experiences. I would work for hours each day trying my best to write a paper that made sense and would flow smoothly between paragraphs. My countless hours of work, however, never seemed to pay off. Every single paper that I had returned to me from my teachers was always covered in bright red Sharpie marker, usually with a large “B” circled somewhere on the front. The words “hard to follow” were...
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...DEPARTMENT OF LANGUAGES AND HUMANITIES CREATIVE WRITING EN1109 ACTIVITY # 1 NAME: MARIA NEÑA N. REYES | Date: | COURSE AND YEAR: LLB – 4TH | Class Schedule: | THE NATURE OF WRITING PROCESS Writing is considered as a complex process that allows writers to explore thoughts and ideas. Concretization of sentences is an important part of the writing just like laying the foundation for a house construction. When thoughts and ideas are written down, they can always be read and re-written, revised, edited, examined, rearranged and changed. The writer must first “think” in the language that he or she is writing. The beginning writing may appear a waterloo. Much of Annie Dillard works have been about the writing process, but she says that “Writing is a hard, conscious, terribly frustrating world!” Considerations according to some differences between Technical and Creative Writing: | Technical Writing | Creative Writing | Content | factual, straight forward | imaginative, metaphoric or symbolic | Audience | specific | general | Purpose | inform, instruct, persuade | entertain, provoke, captivate | Style | formal, standard, academic | informal, artistic, figurative | Tone | Objective | subjective | Vocabulary | specialized | general, evocative | Organization | sequential, systematic | arbitrary, artistic | On Creative Process: Gemino H. Abad gave the following important aspects of creativity: 1. The creative process is not a continuing development or a method but...
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...Portrait of Raymond Carver Mathias & Jonathan Raymond Carver was an american writer and was born in 1938 in Clatskanie, Oregon wherein he loved to fish in the rivers. The landscape portrayed in the video seems very old and depressing (old houses, rusty old cars etc.). His father was an alcoholic which was, unfortunately, eventually passed down to his son, Raymond. His father used to buy him books, when he was a child, which was a reason to him becoming a writer. His first stories were often centered around hard working people, who could barely make it, money-wise. In 1957 Carver married a woman named Maryann Burk, with whom he had two children. They themselves had a lot of monetary issues and could barely make a living, but Carver still wanted to write. They worked hard and his wife worked at several different places e.g. cafés. His stubbornness finally paid off and he got a scholarship for Stanford University. After that he started teaching, and that was the beginning of his alcoholism. Their life got more and more hectic from here on. Carver was even hospitalized for alcoholism four times. It was during the first hospitalization that Carver’s first collection of short stories: “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please”. Eventually Carver and Burk were divorced in 1982, which lead to Carver’s second marriage with poet Tess Gallagher, even though that had been living together for a long time before the divorce. He married Gallagher in 1988 just two weeks before his death.......
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...Writing is a skill set. I consider it one of the basic fundamentals that make up one’s individuality. Writing can be exciting for some and frightening for others. I do enjoy writing, but I am often concerned when I have to write. Writing is a major part of my life, ranging from responding to a guest at work to emailing my attorney about my case. My desire to learn and ability to adapt to the writing process will make me a better writer long term, which will turn this weakness into a strength of mine. I do consider writing a concern of mine. I find myself getting uncomfortable when I have to write. First, I have a hard time starting; I just don’t know where to begin. Secondly, in my opinion, I came up through a poor educational school system in New Orleans. I believe I was not taught the proper way to speak English, nor was I able to write it proficiently. Being a native from New Orleans, I spoke with an unusual tongue that resembles street slang or jargon. I then found myself writing how I spoke. Another problem that I have a hard time with is properly identifying grammatical errors. Since I cannot remember the rules or retain the information to correct errors, I will miss it in my writing or someone else’s writing for that matter. I will begin writing in one form and tense then shift to another form and tense and not notice a difference. This is one reason why I get uneasy about writing. One day while I was at work, the hotel had a pipe burst in a guest room. The room......
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...Writing for me was never a struggle, I was just lazy. I learned to write better when I started college. I would practice writing more because I had to. My writing improved and I desired to write more. When a student doesn’t want to write because they feel they can’t, you can’t expect them to try. Writing is hard and messy; it takes will and caring enough to want to write. It’s that more interesting, stimulating and fun when you write about something that captures your interest to get students motivated to write. I’ll start with one good old fashion method, “motivation.” Motivation plays an essential role in developing good writing skills. Teachers want to be able to present students with the materials and tools they need to gain their interest. It’s also important for them to have access to everything they need at their fingertips. What I also think would make a student’s successful at writing is to implement writing workshops daily, into their everyday curriculum. Routines and rituals are set-up for the workshops. This gives them something to look forward too. It’s a way to work out the things that they struggle with, like not getting enough writing or expectations of how much they should write about. They need to grow on those things, motivate them to focus and brainstorm on ideas and get those ideas down on paper. Motivate them to share and reflect on what they write about. Every day, during the beginning of the class, they start with an expectation for the activity,......
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...Imagine reading a poorly written review of a movie that you would like to see this weekend. You cannot follow the characters, action, or conflict because the author of the review rambles on and on. Without clear paragraphs, this review will likely lose your interest, and you may skip the movie altogether! When you are the writer, it is helpful to position yourself as a reader. Ask yourself whether you can focus easily on each point you make. Effective writers use a single paragraph for each new idea they introduce. Paragraphs separate ideas into logical, manageable, and distinct units. Each paragraph focuses on only one main idea and presents coherent sentences to support that single point. Because all the sentences in one paragraph support the same point, a paragraph may stand on its own. Each paragraph is shaped by Purpose: the reason why the writer composes the paragraph. < Tone: the attitude the writer conveys about the paragraph’s subject. < Audience: the individual or group whom the writer intends to address. < Content: the written material in the paragraph. < 174 WRITING FOR SUCCESS To create longer assignments and to discuss more than one point, writers group together paragraphs and link them together with transitions. The assignment’s purpose, audience, and tone dictate the content, which determines what paragraphs cover and how each will support a main point. The main point of the paragraph is the message you want to share with the...
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...years—the people everyone admired and looked up to—suddenly aren't so stellar anymore. And a few of the marginal students—the ones who didn't care that much about pleasing the professors by reading every page of every assignment—are suddenly sending their own papers off to journals, getting published, and transforming themselves into professional scholars. The difference is not complicated. It's writing. Rachel Toor and other writers on these pages have talked about how hard it is to write well, and of course that's true. Fortunately, the standards of writing in most disciplines are so low that you don't need to write well. What I have tried to produce below are 10 tips on scholarly nonfiction writing that might help people write less badly. 1. Writing is an exercise. You get better and faster with practice. If you were going to run a marathon a year from now, would you wait for months and then run 26 miles cold? No, you would build up slowly, running most days. You might start on the flats and work up to more demanding and difficult terrain. To become a writer, write. Don't...
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...the original idea of the author. Secondly, the following sentence by Crossen (1994), “Although biomedical research incorporates rigorous scientific rules and is often critically scrutinized by peers,” is the same as this one by the student: Biomedical researchers incorporate strict rules of science into their work, which is examined by peers. Note that the only difference is that the student has only changed the words “rigorous” and “scrutinized” to “strict” and “examined,” while maintaining the same sentence structure and flow from Crossen. Examples of Plagiarism The following are two sentences that have been plagiarized. By providing quotation marks and correctly citing the sentences, the student can avoid plagiarism. 1. But it is hard to know if a conflict of interest between doctors, researchers, and the drug company stockholders has tainted the results. Recommended APA in-text citation: According to Crossen (1994), “It is very difficult to discover and virtually impossible to prove that a piece of biomedical research has been tainted by conflict of interest” (p. 167). 2. Biomedical researchers incorporate strict...
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...How to become a Writer Whole books have been written on how to become a good writer, from the building block of constructing a good sentence to selling out novels to put them on the bestsellers. Writing is an artful way of communicating human experience. Paul Graham once said “Writing doesn’t communicate ideas; it generates them. If you are bad at writing and don’t like it, you will miss out on the ideas writing would have generated. Writing is an art which communicates what an individual wants to say in a descriptive form, a good writer would leave his/her readers spellbound through their writing. Usually writers are categorized into two categories, those who want to say something and those who write for sake of writing. In both cases if you aspire to be a writer, you are already in camp two, the idea of writing is camp one to start with. Writing is just like any other discipline in that you won’t get better at it just by thinking about it. The more you write, the better you get at the art of writing and that’s is what makes you a good and effective writer, but for amateurs there are a few guidelines to start with. Figure out what you want to write This is the most important and basic step in writing. Writing is a vast field that encompasses different genres, a good point to start would be writing about something you are familiar with and in most cases best writing usually stem forth from something you already have knowledge and passion about. When you translate your......
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...and professional analysis mean that much in a successful project. I am sure this professional writing class will provide a very good platform for applying what we’ve learnt into workplace. As a college-level writer, I’m driven by my purposes when writing. As what I’ve learnt a lot about argument, thesis statement and position paper from ENGL101 last semester, the most important thing for a writer to do is present enough evidence to audience in a logical structure. I didn’t do very well in it because I constantly failed to focus on my main thesis, which made my paper seem less convincing. To solve this problem, I tried my best to write down a structure of my paper and kept that script with me. It helped me to check out how far I got. According to Lamott’s First Shitty Draft, despite that such process may take a very long while, a writer should spend time on rewriting his/her own work. In my experiences of writing every single piece of assignment, only after reading my works over and over again could I be able to debug them. Another thing I learnt from Debunking the Genius Myth is that the essential way to success in writing is by practicing. Through enough practicing, one can automatically respond to a certain problem. In this course, I think like I will try hard to participate in my in-class task. At least I will follow every instruction to make sure I am not going to screw it up by myself. The most difficult part in writing class for me is that I exactly know what......
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...Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer. This reminds of Haley Diaz, a young, but expressive author of her own works inside of a first grade classroom. She has the smarts, and the ability to reel you in with the words she applies with the use of pen and paper. Haley knows how to construct her papers from start to finish using conventions provided by her teacher. She connects you with imaginative thinking, real life events, and things she has seen. Her use of imagery, English-Language Arts conventions, and detailed illustrations will leave you in awe, and with a big smile. When reading through the first grader’s writing named Haley Diaz, the literary element imagery comes to mind. She allows for you to go with her on her journey from being an amateur writer to an advanced writer. She paints this picture of herself, the things she likes, her family, and what’s most important to her. She captures every single detail, unless it’s something that she doesn’t care about. She pays very close attention to detail to everyday life events, and replicates it in her storytelling. Her illustrations are vivid and provide us with much detail of things that have occurred regardless of the interest level. I see a developing learner with plenty of potential when I read the words she writes on such thick lined paper. This is a......
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...“Writing is like a cocoon turning into a butterfly.” “Writing is like riding a bike the first time, it gets easier as you go.” “Writing is like climbing a mountain face, its hard to do with many obstacles but when you get to the top you feel accomplished.” The above similes express aspects of my experience as a writer. The first simile of a cocoon turning into a butterfly shows that my writing progresses throughout my writing career and will forever get better. This is proven because when my writing career started in elementary school the quality was very poor, but now as my career as a writer has progresses it improves in quality and intensity. It also represents when I start writing a paper, it starts off as a cocoon with the words all compacted and coming together until it comes out all together in a paper. The second simile of riding a bike for the first time is like that first time that you write a paper. It comes out sloppy and not put together very well but as you keep writing you get better and better until you can write just like riding a bike, as you start off you can't stay up and it is hard to ride but the more you ride the better you get until you can successfully ride a bike. The third simile of climbing a mountain is exactly like when you start writing a paper. You get stuck trying to come up with that first topic sentence its just like finding that first hand hold you can pick one but its not sturdy enough to hold your weight or you can not...
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...! We were given multiple readings this semester. There were certain readings that I really liked and could relate to. To be more specific, one of my favorites was Clueless in Academe. There were others that were aimed at helping me but I was too hard headed to practice. Such as the revision, prewriting, and brainstorming excerpts. My least favorite, the one that I think has less benefit is Revision Strategies of Student Writer and Experienced Adult Writers. Both of the reading were aimed for the betterment of my writing, however; Clueless by Gerald Groff is the one that really grabbed my attention and related to me the most. At the beginning of the semester I was still getting the feel of Middle Tennessee State University and how college functioned. The excerpt reading I liked the most and fit me best was From Clueless in Academe by Gerald Groff. He speaks of how cluelessness is a natural stage. Nevertheless, it is a stage you can escape. He recognizes the potential street smarts college students, and students in general utilize these days. I like to think that I am street smart, as is my writing. Sometimes I may not be completely accurate on the subject, but I can still make it sound good—and some teachers do not get that—as Gerald Groff explains in the reading. As the semester has progressed so has my knowledge of writing and how I write. After reading Groff’s piece I feel more at peace with that clueless feeling I get every so often when......
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...through adjusting our own writing habits. The mistakes that Orwell brings up are not the typical mistakes of grammar, punctuation or spelling. No, he attacks the very way that a whole generation of English writers has grown accustom to writing and expressing their ideas, and I could not agree with him more. Orwell breaks these simple mistakes into four major types: dying metaphors, verbal false limbs, pretentious diction and meaningless words. When used, these mistakes create sentences that do not express ideas clearly and use common terms and phrases “copied and pasted” from one writer to another. This leads to a lack of originality and writing that is more of a conglomerate of catchy phrases and buzzwords rather than cohesive, well thought-out sentences. I agree with this school of thought. I have seen many students my age who are afraid of writing the wrong thing or having their ideas rejected, so they write in the manner which Orwell is concerned with as to mask their inner writing insecurity. Many also think that using dying metaphors, verbal false limbs, and pretentious diction makes them sound smarter or acceptable at the college level. However, these habits do nothing but make the readers’ job harder and make the writer sound like a politician trying to avoid answering a hard...
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...Just You I like reading The Economist and watching "I love the 80s." I like tennis, Fazoli's breadsticks and writing assignments. I value honesty, commitment, scholarship and kindness. These are hard and true facts, but there is a lot I do not know about myself. I don't know how I feel about the death penalty, I have mixed feelings about religion, and I don't know what I think about a cashless society. I have no stock answer to offer about a life-changing experience or a moment of enlightenment, and it is hard for me to give a comprehensive proclamation of who I am, for my identity unfolds more every day as my experiences grow. Since I am only 17 years old, life has a lot of unfolding to do. I dislike saying "I am trying to find myself" because my identity is not lost, it just needs more uncovering. Luckily for me, what I love to do and want to be helps me uncover more about myself. I want to be a writer. I may not end up a professional writer but I will always write, even if I am the only one interested in my work, because writing is my self-reflection. When writing, I sometimes get worked up into such a fervor that I barely know what I am saying. I just let my fingers fly over the keyboard and the ideas pour from my head. When I go back through the jumble of unpunctuated ideas, I notice a theme running through the writing. I don't try to put a moral in the theme, but invariably it happens. Evaluating the theme and the rest of the writing helps me interpret my own......
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