Blog #6

I learned a lot in this class. More than I ever did in any English class I ever had in high school.
The transitions sentences were fun, hard, but fun. They made me think outside the box. TS/CD was new to me. I do not recall talking about this in high school. TS/CD was very hard for me to get. When the teacher was talking about it I understood it well and it seemed so easy. But when it came time for me to do it, I had a bit of a hard time. I am happy to say that I feel like I finally got it. I just have to remember to double check that my writing is structured that way. When you structure your paragraphs with TS/CD it sounds good and looks good. From now on if I have to write anything, I will be thinking in my head TS/CD, TS/CD, CM, CM. I also learned to cite, never thought this even existed, and it is so important. I am glad I never had to write anything that needed to be cited or I would be in trouble. Owl was a great resource for writing and citing. I have already talked to my kids about this and had them check out the website to get familiar with it so when they have to write papers in school they can use it as a resource. My daughter says that the teachers do not give you good resources and she had not heard of Owl before. My kids found it very helpful and learned some things.

Even though it took a while for me to start writing the essays, I enjoyed it. It exercised and opened up my mind to think of things that my mind is not used to thinking about. One thing I would like to improve on is using stronger verbs. I noticed that my writing is really simple and I would like it to sound a bit more formal, not too formal though, I would like for my writing to be easy to read. I just do not want to sound too simple either. I want to sound intellectual and smart. Maybe I should get the dictionary and start looking up verbs starting with the letter A and going to Z and writing them down like Malcolm X did in his essay “Literacy Behind Bars.” I am not serious by the way.

What made me feel the best about my writing and development was when I would be working on an essay and it would flow, that is such a good feeling. Or when ideas would just pop up in my head and I could write about them. And the best part of this class was the teacher, Kristen Peters. What a great teacher! Writing can be challenging for a lot of people and she made it seem like it was the easiest thing ever. That helped me to try and not stress about my writing, since I am very conscious about it. She told me once that I was a good writer. Great compliment! Coming from someone so knowledgeable in English. That was very encouraging.