Blog Prompt for 9/4

Based on the information you can glean from this website, how do you define rhetoric? You may adopt a version of the definition provided by the writers, but you must have specific reasons for the adoption. Granted that this class has to do with rhetoric and based on the discussions we had last week (and will have this week), how should we take this information into consideration? What did you find helpful about the site? What was unhelpful? Please cite the website at the end of your post using MLA format. If you're unfamiliar with MLA, you can ask me about it, or consult Purdue OWL.

The minimum for this post is 500 words. Because this is much longer than usual, you will receive a quiz grade for this post on completion in addition to the blog post credit. The grade on the quiz, however, is dependent on how well you shore up your argument. Now might be a good time to try out some of the techniques Graff has been talking about.

In your comments, try to focus on making your classmates' arguments stronger by critiquing (with mediating language as always) points of their arguments which might need strengthening.

 καλή τύχη!

Hello! Ah, high school English class. It's hard to discern whether it was pure hell or something actually tolerable. Well, I guess you could say it was a conglomerate of both. Writing creatively or analytically came natural to me; it never posed a problem for me to type research papers or write short stories in creative writing. Freshman year English class was composed mostly of composition, grammar, and analyzing novels. This class served as a basis for the other English classes I took henceforth. I used grammar skills to string together more complex sentences within my work, and analyzing novels allowed me to find symbolism without a teacher's guidance. The best part of all my English classes was the reading and analyzing aspect. I loved exploring stories like the adventures of Huck and Finn or the island where the Lord of the Flies reigned, and then analyzing the composition's deeper meaning. I didn't necessarily hate anything from my English classes in high school, rather, I thought that some of the writing prompts were dry or merely simple.

Based on the title of this class, Advanced Strategies of Rhetoric and Research, I would assume that we will be building onto the skills I learned my freshman year: analyzing and complexity. Therefore, by taking this class, we will be able to concentrate on more complex arguments and discussions. The only concern I would have about this class is being able to put together a concise and persuasive point on the topic given-- and then being able to back it up. Other than that, let the challenge begin.

English Class

      My English classes in high school were very structured. We were expected to start every paper with a thesis statement and follow a detailed outlined.  Once the outline was completed, we developed a draft from the outline and submit it to the teacher for comments.  The final paper was completed after the teacher provided their comments.  Honestly, I liked the structure that the outline offered because it was clear what I needed to do in order to write a good paper.  We frequently wrote about books we were reading and presented an argument.  I really enjoyed trying to convince my audience about a specific point of view. 

     Communication and English are very prevalent in everyday life which is why I think it is so important.  Communication, especially writing, allows people to express themselves.  I think this is more difficult in other subjects.  From a personal experience, I have learned that the more I read, the better writer I become.  I try to read every day.  Sometimes it’s just reading the news on-line, but I also like to pick up a book that seems interesting. 

     I am very excited to be taking an English class this semester. My goal for the class is to learn to organize my thoughts even before I start to write.  If I can organize the start, middle, and end, I feel that it’s easier to get started.  This is always a challenge for me.  I also want to improve how to transition between topics and ideas.  I want to expand what I already know and challenge myself to become the best writer possible.

My High School Writing Experience

     Hello everyone. I never liked English class at all throughout High School because every class was more of a literature appreciation class than it was a class instructing students about writing skills or how to use language in general. I learned more about language mechanics and grammar from my Spanish classes than I did from any of my honors/AP English courses. However, because of this, I enjoyed when I got to write a paper and exercise my creative freedom, as it was a refreshing break from memorizing poems and discussing cryptic literature. I liked writing any kind of essay, but my favorites were shorter, reflective works with limited structure. It was a jarring transition from Junior to Senior year, because my Senior year AP literature teacher had incredibly high standards for papers, no matter how formal or informal the assignment was. I hadn't ever been exposed to such strict grading before, and I feel like it wasn't as productive as having a smooth transition from High School level writing to College level writing starting in Junior year. In short: I liked the assignments and the writing itself, but I didn't particularly like the classes or the grading.

       I look forward to taking this class because the material we will cover includes some of the things that I always wanted to learn in my former English classes, but never got around to actually learning. I'm excited to work on writing effectively, as one of the main points I've had to work on throughout school is simply organizing my thoughts and communicating my main points more effectively.

High school English

In my high school English classes, I was frequently required to write papers in response to a prompt. Usually, the prompt related to the work that we were reading in the class at the time. We were instructed to form a thesis, make an outline, and then write and revise our work. Personally, I liked having that structured process to follow. It allowed me to organize my thoughts. I learned a lot from my high school English teachers because that department was much more difficult compared to the other subjects at my school. Looking back, I think that my school’s emphasis on wanting us to become better communicators was a valid goal—especially to prepare us for college. What I enjoyed most from my classes were the books that we read like Pride and Prejudice, Things Fall Apart, and The Awakening. My senior year we frequently had seminar discussions about the readings, which I liked because they helped me to become better at articulating my ideas. We were graded on our participation in these discussions, so that forced me to jump into the conversation to state my opinion. In high school I didn’t like reading poetry as much as I did short stories or novels. Personally, writing with a plot is easier to follow. I struggled with sorting out what the poems were trying to say. Sometimes the symbolism and deeper meaning just went over my head.

Based on the title of this class, I hope to learn to become better at researching and being persuasive with my ideas. I hope that this course challenges me because when I have to work hard, then I learn more. Also, I expect that this class will prepare me for higher-level English courses.

Writing. Ew.

My high school writing experience was quite the roller coaster. Coming from a pretty prestigious grade school, I entered high school feeling confident about my writing abilities. Writing was never an activity that I particularly enjoyed though… I actually hated it. I hated having to come up with some sort of creative idea to write an ENTIRE paper on. I hated having to then take that idea in my head and somehow transfer that to paper for someone else to try to understand. I hated how long the papers took to write, and how from teacher to teacher expectations for these papers changed. 

I coasted through both freshman and sophomore English classes. I would rarely read the books, put minimal effort into writing my papers, and then somehow end up with an A. I was pretty comfortable with that arrangement. Then Junior year came…. During junior year, one single man changed my whole mindset on writing. Mr. Gaia. He was a new teacher, and was pretty tough guy. He was for sure a hard ass. After day 1 of his class, I knew that my comfortable writing process was about to be flipped completely upside down. 

I spent junior year really growing as a writer. I would actually read the books for class. I was able to appreciate the literature,and I would hunt through the books to try to find a topic that I was excited to write about. I would come up with these ideas that I was super excited about, I would tell Mr. Gaia, and he would immediately shut down my idea. “Your idea is a good one for an average writer, you’re way beyond that level. How about you try to write about this…?” His ideas were always 4384924890248 times harder than the one I had originally picked for myself. I was forced to challenge myself more than I thought I could possibly handle. Through this, I was able to grow as a writer. I was able to write papers that were extremely creative, and I was able to effectively present my point, and find strong evidence to support that point. I will be forever thankful for Mr. Gaia’s help in discovering my writing talent. 

From the title of this class, I am expecting to really nail down the skills of research, and writing convincing research papers. I am nervous about all of that. I know from high school how much effort goes into research papers, but I also know how proud I always am of the final product. I also know that my writing is going to be held to a higher standard. This is college, not high school. I’m ready to take this on, and I’m ready to grow in my writing abilities even more. 

My High School Writing Experience

High school was an important time in my life. It shaped me not only as a writer, but as a person too. I put forth a great deal of effort to develop myself as a student and it certainly paid off as I would not be here today if I hadn't. One of the things great about high school is that you get to see yourself physically and mentally develop. As a writer I could see major improvements over the course of my four years at high school. My vocabulary improved as did my sentence structure and attention to detail. This was due to practice, as most improvements are

. I easily wrote a few hundred papers in high school. Each one better than the last, for the most part. The thing I really enjoyed about my writing experience in was the variety of topics and prompts there were. I wrote everything from research papers, argumentative essays, rhetorical analysis papers, blog posts, complaint letters, to your basic persuasive essays. Having this range of papers under my belt will only benefit me for my writing endeavors here at SLU because I will have some background in this area. The bad part of my high school writing experience was the lack of help and tutoring offered by my school. If I needed help with my paper I had to seek it from my parents or siblings. While this was still beneficial to me, having a good writing center with experienced writers would have been much more helpful and convenient . None the less I still greatly developed as a writer in many ways. Some of the main aspects of writing that I learned in high school consisted of sentence structure, rhetorical writing, quote analysis, etc. I also did a big research paper my senior year in my Advanced Composition class. I read a book about the 9/11 attacks and how the terrorist groups developed in the years prior. I then developed a thesis from my readings and supported it with several research articles. In the end I spent about two months on this project, and my paper ended up being about 14 pages long. Going through that experience was miserable at times but I am glad I went through because it prepared me for the challenges in college that I am about to encounter.

Based on the title of this class I assume we will be doing work similar to what I did in high school. I am sure we will be incorporating our book into our writing which I have done many times. Also, I noticed that we will be working on rhetorical essays hence the title of the class. Fortunately, I did write one of those in the fall of my senior year and I am also quite proud of that paper. As for my concerns, I worry that the papers we will be assigned are going to be quite challenging and complex but fortunately we do have the incredibly convenient University Writing Services which I will definitely be taking advantage of. My only other concern that the UWS can't help me with is the reading quizzes. Depending on how difficult the read is these could be challenging but I have my fingers crosses that they are relatively straight forward. In the end, I know that my high school writing experiences have prepared me greatly for college and even though there will be obstacles that come my way I am excited to encounter them.

High school writing experience

        Hello all. Looking back to my high school days, writing is not something that prominently sticks out. My school wasn’t really writing focused, yes we did timed-writings and such but it was always focusing more on the mathematics and the sciences. However, that being said, we did have a few writing assignments that stood out among the rest. My sophomore, junior, and senior year in various AP and honors English classes, we were assigned research papers. These were papers that were to be at least 15 pages long and extensive research and citations were also required. As a class, we did extensive writing labs, peer edits, and instructor editing sessions. These papers had to be perfect. Coming from a school that didn’t focus on writing that much one would expect me to not like writing as much as the other guy, on the contrary, I love writing. I may not be the most concise writer, or the most grammatically correct writer, but I do love it. I look forward to the writing aspect of this class and college in general. One thing that I learned from my high school writing experience is not that “practice makes perfect” but “perfect practice makes perfect”. Seeing as I didn’t get the extensive practice in high school as some of my peers, I look forward to getting that practice time in during not only this class, but also my college career. My major concern with this class and college writing is the strict scrutiny that my writing will be put under. Every little mistake is another point off my paper’s overall grade. Every misplaced coma is another point off, every misspelled word, another point. With the practice I will get in this class, I hope to alleviate those worries into oblivion and go through college writing stress free.

Past Writing Experience and Thoughts

Writing and journalism actually run in my blood. My grandma and a friend of hers started their own local newspaper/shopper in the 80's. My grandma, mom, and dad still currently work for this newspaper. In regards to this, I have been very experienced to writing even before high school. In fact, I used to write a short weekly column for the newspaper in middle school. So, writing in high school, you could say, came easy to me. I had excellent guidance and sources at home to proof read my writings. The English Department at my high school could be considered as a rookie team. The staff changed frequently so I didn't have a lot of veteran teachers in English especially. However, that does not necessarily mean they were bad teachers, just inexperienced. I feel that I have been taught and molded in my writing skills with correct protocol. I love the ability to creative write and I am not a fan of rubrics. I tend to want to do things my own way and convey my thoughts the way I choose. I suppose this is a hope I have for college writing. I don't think there is anything wrong with structures and guidelines for writing. I just like to let the creative juices flow and express myself. I liked writing about books in high school is well. It is always interesting to see how everyone in the class got something different out of the same material. I hope we have discussions and exchange opinions in the college classroom. This is also the first time I have ever blogged so I look forward to this new experience too.

Past Memories of My High School Days

High school is an important time for everybody. If someone says otherwise, they are wrong. I found new skills and friends throughout my journey in my high school years. Each day I was faced with difficulties from my various classes. But as the years went on, I learned how to tackle almost every problem that I encountered, whether studying for my math final, preparing for a Spanish test, or reviewing vocab for English. Throughout all those years, English was one of the most difficult classes I had to take. Especially English junior year. That year I had probably the hardest junior English teacher. I never fully conquered his tests and quizzes. My easiest year of English was surprisingly my senior year. Advanced composition was the name of the English class. I had to write a paper almost every week for a semester. I ended the class with a very solid grade. Some things I have looked back upon after graduating high school is that I do not like poetry at all and I think reading it is a waste a time. One of my strengths would be writing papers while given a particular topic. Based on the title of this class, I would  imagine the class will teach me and my fellow students different strategies on how to write papers. Also, teach us how to express our opinion better to the reading audience. A concern of mine is reading poetry, I have previously stated, I hate poetry. The only poetry I can actually stand is in music. Other than that one small concern, I feel I am prepared to tackle this class and the rest of my college classes.

Graff Quiz 1

Quiz. (open notes, open book)

Additional Reading for Tuesday 9/1/15

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/27/books/essay-books-make-you-a-boring-person.html

Eloquence

 Eloquence is aspiring to be more sophisticated in regards to a culture while being clear and effective in a respectful manner

Eloquent: effectively, concisely, and harmoniously communicating points of talk or topics of interest to an audience which includes peers, evaluators, educators, and those within your community

Abigail, Maddie, Anna and Meghan

Our definition of eloquent is a way of expressing yourself clearly and effectively while being comfortable with your words and doing so in a presentable, culturally acceptable manner.

Peas in a Pod (Laura, Rachel, Maddy, Matt)

eloquent: mastery of language and expression so that a specific audience understands the point being made

Pod definition of "Eloquent"

Eloquent (adj): Clear and concise that appropriately addresses a target audience with keeping the culture and context in mind.

Jogging Down Memory Lane

When it comes to my high school writing experience, it was the best times and it was the worst of times. For starters, I attended two different high schools. Each had their own curriculum and different writing strategies projected for their students. The first high school I attended was Belleville East, there I learned to check and double check and even triple check for grammar and spelling errors and conjunctions. I also learned to cite everything!! Even when you think you have cited it all, go ahead and cite again, just because you love doing it. Although I hated this part of my writing experience, it has caused me to be more cautious with my assignments before I turn them in.

The second high school I attended was O'Fallon Township High School. Hands down this was my favorite high school. Besides being a senior, having no uniform, and graduating early, I made amazing connections with my teachers and took away great lessons and skills to use throughout life. Believe it or not, my favorite teacher was my English teacher. Mrs. Morrison was beyond amazing! She was zany and fun, but meant business. I learned different styles of writing, different types of research, and different approaches to my audience. While Belleville East may have structured my writing abilities, O'Fallon perfected them and gave me the confidence to be creative in my writing. My most valuable lesson was "learning to speak as if I was a political speaker but being as creative as a magazine editor," quoted by Mrs. Morrison herself.

What I would like to improve on are my research skills, word variation, and citation skills. Though I have adopted each of these skills, as I ascend the academic ladder and go into the education field, I find it important to perfect them. I do believe that within this course I can accomplish these goals and more. First viewing the name of the course, "Advanced Strategies In Rhetoric And Research," I feared that maybe I had enrolled in the wrong course. However, after viewing the syllabus and meeting my professor, I feel ecstatic about this semester. What I expect from this course is aid in my writing ability, polishing the good writing habits I have, and discarding the bad.

First arriving to college I was worried about receiving writing assignments that were due in short amounts of time ranging from 10-25 pages. However I have not encountered any writing assignments of that magnitude or that were due short notice. To be candid, my college experience has left me speechless. I can honestly say I am having the time of my life. Besides the parties and late nights, homework has not dreadful, my professors have been top notch, my friends are coasting along with me, my boyfriend provides comic relief, and I have family supporting me through this journey. I look forward to the next two years at Saint Louis University and cannot wait to see what this one holds. Hope you guys are as pumped as I am!

High School English

High school, a milestone I have not only passed but succeeded in completing, as clearly shown by my prestigious choice of university. For me English was always a struggle, I always got the feeling my teachers and myself never fully clicked, especially in English class. Writing seemed tedious; an exertion not an expression where thesis statements and correct formatting clogged my mind. The droll of timed writings in which I spent half the time lost in my own imagination truly set the standard for my appreciation of English class. Now to be fair I always viewed myself as a decent writer, but I struggled to express my ideas on paper, and I always considered my grammar to be atrocious. I found myself scrapping for motivation in long essays over books, that I never truly read. I was stuck; beached like a whale in a sense struggling to escape the scheduled life of high school. Now begins a new chapter; gone are the days of comparing SAT scores and stressing over college admittance essays; it's surreal to think that at this point in time life may never be any better. Now I truly believe that for English class as well, a new leaf has been turned and I whole-heartedly believe that English class may change along with it. I strive to believe that in this college experience that everyone raves about I will finally be able to write in a way that I want and not by a format a teacher tells me to write. But other than that, nah hopefully college English will be a blast.

High School English Classes

Hello Everyone! As I think about my high school career, it seems as if my English classes did not have a large impact on me. I didn't necessarily enjoy English classes nor dread them.  There were few assignments in which I felt passionate about and thoroughly liked researching, writing, and revising. However, there were a lot of assignments where I did not see a purpose, in fact, a lot of it just seemed like busy work.In addition, my like and dislike of the class depended largely upon the teacher. Some of my teachers in high school did not seem passionate about English and went through the class in a very mundane manner.  Personally, I liked my math and science classes much more than any other class. I like to have a clear distinction between what is wrong and what is right when I do schoolwork. Unlike math and science, I think English gave me too much free reign in deciphering the difference between an extraordinary and boring paper.
On the other hand, I do want to increase my writing and critical thinking skills. I would like to be able to interpret subjects on a deeper level whether it is in an conversation, reading literature, or in writing papers. I hope this class will be beneficial to me, and help me develop all the basic skills I have learned in high school. I hope our SLU class will be a great atmosphere for discussion, and a place to learn from each other. Overall, I am excited for this course and I am feeling optimistic towards all of our upcoming assignments.

My English Experience.

Yo!  I love English.  I'm majoring in it.  You could say my experience in high school with the subject was a very positive one, considering I had no intention of studying English past the high school level before my freshman year.  My freshman English teacher led the class in discussions about the texts, and he encouraged us to delve deeper into what the authors tried to communicate.  During that year, I started to see the beauty in the structure and arguments of an analytical paper.  The following year, my teacher exposed me to creative writing, a field of English I had not explored previously.  We read The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and he assigned a short creative composition in McCarthy's style.  From that point on, my interest in English remained most intensely with the creative side.  However, I enjoy applying that creative side to analytical papers as well.  I spent my junior year of high school with two teachers whose teaching styles did not prove very effective for me.  Neither of them seemed to care about the students' individual progress.  My senior year of English went a lot better.  My classes did not focus on any creative element of writing, but I was able to apply several different strategies I picked up throughout the year in all of my papers.  All in all, high school English was a good time!  When I was not happy with my teachers, I read a lot of different material on my own to try to broaden my writing abilities.

From the name of this class, I am guessing we will be focusing more on argumentative essays.  I look forward to developing my skills further and learning new tools to craft clear and concise arguments.  As with anything new, I am worried that I will not be able to keep up with all the new information at first.  College has already presented several challenges, both in and out of the classroom.  It follows that a college-level English course will set new and interesting challenges upon me throughout the semester.  In this way, I will be forced to adjust and manage my time and talents more efficiently.  Nevertheless, I know college as a whole will mold me into the person I want to be.  I am looking forward to challenging myself with new classes and new experiences that will benefit my writing.

High School Writing Experience

I could easily say I enjoyed writing during my years in high school. My favorite type of essay to write was actually a research essay. I liked researching a topic and putting what I learned on paper so someone else could learn about it too. This was especially enjoyable when there weren’t many guidelines for your topic and I could choose one I was genuinely interested in. I also didn’t mind comparing and contrasting topics, assuming they were topics I found interesting. But there were also several types of essays I enjoyed much less. I had to write a lot of essays about books we read as a class. I would have enjoyed this if I appreciated the books we read, but most of them seemed irrelevant. What I learned most in high school is how to organize my essays. High school also helped a great deal with my skills in organizing paragraphs and putting them in an order that makes sense. I also believe high school writing classes helped me with my spelling and grammar. I would have liked to learn more about what is expected of you in college. I am worried my teachers in high school may not have prepared me for all the writing I have to do at a college level. I thought it would be a good idea to take an english class starting out as a freshman to gain some writing skills needed in other courses. I expect this class will help me with writing strategies in my classes now, and in the next four years.

An English House In Development

Greetings all, as I sit here and stare at my computer screen thinking about my high school writing experience, several things come to mind. I learned a lot, but not everything I learned I enjoyed and there are things I wished I had learned better.  

What first comes to mind is my freshman year of high school: the foundation of my writing career. It was in this year I learned lots of grammar and how to properly learned to write a paragraph. For writing paragraphs, what I learned was the complex deductive style; this meant the topic sentence came at the very beginning and had a number of major supports which had minor supports, followed by the concluding sentence. That was a nice start but this was the foundation, which meant there was more to come.

Sophomore year I took this knowledge of what I had gained as a freshman and expanded it to five paragraphs. This was the year of the five paragraph essay. It was a rocky start, but eventually I got the hang of things and my writing drastically improved. I was no longer completely dependent on my sister (who is an associate editor) and could begin to comfortably write papers on my own.

My junior and senior year my writing was like a mathematical constant; it never changed. Anytime my teachers gave out a writing assignment I automatically thought of the five paragraph essay format; it was instinctual at this point. I wrote (to what I believe) some very fantastic papers, but towards the end of my high school English career, I was getting bored. If you imagine my freshman year as the foundation to a house, and my sophomore year as the walls of the house being built, I equate my junior and senior year as a stagnated period where not much was accomplished, and all that is left is a near complete house. I learned a few useful tools as an upperclassman, but nothing as big and important as my first two years in high school.

This takes me to the current state of where I am with my writing. I can spit out a five paragraph essay without much difficulty, but that is boring, writing is more than that. It is a nice start, but there are more ways to write a paper than this format. I wish I had learned other ways to write papers, maybe in the style of a New York Times articles (granted, this is to a different audience, but it would still have been nice to learn how to write like this). I also wish I had learned how to use some different grammatical tools in my papers. Freshman year I learned about the colon, semicolon, etc., but I feel like I never fully learned how to utilize them in my writing.

I find myself wanting to expand what I know of writing. I do not have OCD by any means, but I hate having things left unfinished, and currently, I feel like this “house” I have been building is close to being finished, there are just some final tasks to be done. That is what I am hoping to accomplish with this English class. Judging by the title of the class, what I will be learning is how to write persuasively (I have deduced this from the word “rhetoric”). This is a crucial skill needed for anybody (especially for those individuals in business related careers) so I look forward to learning how to expand what I know of persuasive writing with this class. I also look forward to expanding what I know of writing and utilizing some new tools that will enable me to finish this “house” I have been working on since my freshman year of high school. I have concerns about writing long papers (what I consider long is anything more than 6 pages) and I’m sure there will be struggle involved (I usually only wrote papers three to five pages in length) but that is how growth happens. But I am at a Jesuit university, and that is one lesson that they stress: getting yourself out of your comfort zone and growing. I’m sure in this class, I will learn many useful skills that will help me communicate effectively/persuasively, but also help me finish this proverbial house I have been working on since my freshman year of high school.  

High School Writing Experience

I'm much fonder of subjects such as math and science than English so I never really enjoyed writing in high school much. This was largely because I had to take classes such as creative writing and I am much more comfortable writing with a specific purpose in mind than trying to pull something out of thin air. I also felt the skills necessary for creative writing compared to any other type of writing weren't useful enough to me personally for it to be worth the trouble. My biggest concern for this class and any future English classes I have to take is that they will be oriented toward that kind of writing. However, that doesn't mean that I hate or can't do any sort of writing in general. I debated for a while in high school and I had a good time and was fairly good at writing speeches because I was able to focus on more familiar skills like critical thinking and then just work on transferring them into writing and later verbal communication. Improving my ability to properly structure an argument and anticipate its possible counters was a very useful skill to learn since most of the writing I do in the future will likely be to make some sort of point directly rather than through a form of English I don't particularly enjoy or excel at such as storytelling. Based on the title of the class including the word rhetoric I expect much of what we do will be focused on argumentation and debate so I believe this class will be fairly beneficial because it will give me the kinds of writing skills that are actually useful across all majors such as learning to write concisely, yet also convincingly and fluently.

High School Writing Experience

Hi! My high school writing experience was very beneficial to helping me learn how to write successfully. Since sophomore year I have had to write many papers, including multiple research papers, response papers, and literary analyses. I think research papers were the most interesting papers I had to write. I don't mind writing; I think I hate the idea of starting a paper more than actually starting. Once I get writing, my ideas and words usually come naturally. One thing I hated during high school was that my English teacher junior and senior year would make us write in-class timed essays over pieces of literature, without knowing the prompts prior to class. While I didn't necessarily enjoy the stress behind these assignments, it made me a better, efficient, and concise writer.

In this class, I expect to learn more about becoming a persuasive communicator, either through speaking or writing. I am looking forward to learning more effective techniques for arguments in papers and other areas, because a frequent comment on my papers in high school were that my arguments were not "strong" enough. I'm a bit nervous for the public speaking aspect of this class, because I'm fairly quiet, but I'm open to learning new techniques for speaking in front of a group. I'm a little bit concerned for the rigor of college classes, but my high school was very rigorous as well, so I feel fairly prepared. I'm looking forward to the rest of this class with everyone!

Hello! I enjoyed my high school writing experience.  I went to a school that encouraged us to write in every class.  As I reflect on it, the best year for my writing was my senior year.  Every day in class, my English teacher asked us to write about what we had read the night before.  She taught us to analyze and respond to the readings, rather than just summarize, which I found to be a very useful skill.  Another thing that I found useful from writing in high school was having to write a thesis paper at the end of our senior year as a requirement to graduate.  This was useful in learning how to create a detailed outline, an annotated bibliography, as well as writing a many paged paper. 

                  Of course, my high school writing was just an introduction to what I hope to learn through college English classes.  I hope to be able to write better by the time my four years at SLU is up, especially hoping that I am able to obtain a much more expansive vocabulary.  I also hope to be able to write more eloquently.  Hopefully, another thing that I hope I can learn is how to write faster.  For me, it takes a long time to process my thoughts and form them into something that is easy to read.  I would would like to be able to speed that up, if that is even possible.  Other than that, I am excited to hear feedback about my writing by others in the class as well as from the resources provided to us from SLU!